It’s not that “murder is cheap”, it’s that many countries figured out that holding a person indefinitely in prison doesn’t do anything for their rehabilitation, only puts money in the prison’s owner’s pocket.
The point of most European prisons is to get the prisoner to understand and repent their crime, teach them some useful skills, and send them back to be a productive member of society. The point of US prisons is to just eliminate a person from public life in revenge.
Good luck with this one. The American idea of adjudication for crime is so utterly fucked by indoctrination from decades of propaganda for privatized prison systems. It doesn’t matter if you point out that lengthy prison sentences do nothing to serve the public good, that research shows they do essentially nothing in terms of serving as a deterrent, that encouraging rehabilitation and correcting systemic issues that lead to crime would be the thing to truly address these issues. Let alone the systemic issues abound in the American justice system; that enforcement of crimes are disproportionately skewed to impact people of low SES and minority status, that this whole system is a front to enable modern day slavery.
Ultimately these people are just bloodthirsty and this gives them an outlet for that. They are vindictive and want an outlet for revenge fantasies. Just mention sex offenders and see how they become awful right wing weirdos with violent torture fantasies out of a saw movie.
It’s not that “murder is cheap”, it’s that many countries figured out that holding a person indefinitely in prison doesn’t do anything for their rehabilitation, only puts money in the prison’s owner’s pocket.
The point of most European prisons is to get the prisoner to understand and repent their crime, teach them some useful skills, and send them back to be a productive member of society. The point of US prisons is to just eliminate a person from public life in revenge.
Good luck with this one. The American idea of adjudication for crime is so utterly fucked by indoctrination from decades of propaganda for privatized prison systems. It doesn’t matter if you point out that lengthy prison sentences do nothing to serve the public good, that research shows they do essentially nothing in terms of serving as a deterrent, that encouraging rehabilitation and correcting systemic issues that lead to crime would be the thing to truly address these issues. Let alone the systemic issues abound in the American justice system; that enforcement of crimes are disproportionately skewed to impact people of low SES and minority status, that this whole system is a front to enable modern day slavery.
Ultimately these people are just bloodthirsty and this gives them an outlet for that. They are vindictive and want an outlet for revenge fantasies. Just mention sex offenders and see how they become awful right wing weirdos with violent torture fantasies out of a saw movie.
But have you considered: systematic prison violence and rape = funny?
It’s not cruel or unusual if it’s only encouraged, not done, by the state.
And the legal slavery, dont forget about the legalized slavery. The north may have won our civil war, but the south won the peace.