Reg. outlawery, exile, or summary execution as an alternative to prison:
loomer wrote:And therein lies the difference. 'Get out before we kill you' is not a death penalty. It may, under many circumstances, act as one - but it is not a death penalty for all that it may result in death. It is the acknowledgement that a person's conduct is such that they have irrevocably broken the bonds holding them to their society, and as such, are entitled to no treatment at all. This is the mess I'm referring to when I say a pure death penalty is cleaner, but the central distinction is that a death penalty does not actually place the person beyond the lawful community but rather reinforces that they are subject to those laws.
The outlaw, by contrast, is - by their own actions - beyond the law, and thus, beyond any consideration owed to them by the community, as the community is the law. This is necessarily an approach that must be indifferent to the suffering of those who deliberately place themselves completely and utterly beyond the scope of the law, but the outlaw under discussion - a person that cannot be treated or rehabilitated in any way, who genuinely cannot be reformed or reached and who has the full capacity necessary to be ascribed guilt - is necessarily one who possesses the rationality to comprehend what they're doing and comprehend that their failure to reform themselves will lead to whatever fate meets them beyond the borders of the law, and so the indifference is to actions wrought wholly and only by their own hand, rationally and willingly. Starvation or disease or exposure (or whatever other fate - more likely they'll be shot by someone) is not inflicted on them by the law, but by their own active and callous malevolence towards the community constituted by the law.
I am deeply wary of any system which promotes and indeed requires a societal indifference to suffering in order to work. Such attitudes can infect a society, and once you start dehumanizing and othering some people, it becomes easier to do it to others.
In any case, such a system is unworkable in practice, because it is very unlikely that the exiled person would be able to find another country willing to take them in. If they tried to, they would likely be deported back, at which point they would presumably be killed.
This is, incidentally, a violation of international law:
https://unhcr.com/un-conventions-on-statelessness.html
The 1954 Convention is designed to ensure that stateless people enjoy a minimum set of human rights. It establishes the legal definition of a stateless person as someone who is “not recognized as a national by any state under the operation of its law.” Simply put, this means that a stateless person is someone who does not have the nationality of any country. The 1954 Convention also establishes minimum standards of treatment for stateless people in respect to a number of rights. These include, but are not limited to, the right to education, employment and housing. Importantly, the 1954 Convention also guarantees stateless people a right to identity, travel documents and administrative assistance.
I am also curious as to how such a system would deal with the extremely violent while awaiting trial- would they be allowed to run free until their trial and appeals were concluded?
In any case, since you admit that the practical effect of the law in most cases is to consign these people to a slow death by starvation, exposure, and disease, or a (relatively) quick one by vigilante murder/summary execution, what this amounts to is, indeed, knowingly bringing about someone's death in a deliberately cruel manner, but in such a way that society (and by extension, yourself) could wash its/your hands of it and pretend that it wasn't pulling the trigger.
It's a harsher position than just shooting them, but it preserves an epistemic difference that I find important. To just shoot them as the lawful punishment is to retain them within the confines of the community constituted by the law, which they, by their own actions, have demonstrated themselves not to be a part of. If they remain members of the community, then obligations are owed to them - that one ought not to kill one's own community, for instance. Outlawing them, however, affirms their outside status and places the guilt of any killing that follows squarely on their own heads.
I would argue that it falls on the society and people who knowingly and deliberately took actions that they knew would result in deaths. But ultimately, the academic theory of who is responsible is less significant to me than the actual, practical, physical consequences of a policy in terms of sentient suffering.
It is also, of course, extremely unlikely that such a system would never be abused or punish people in error, and while a wrongfully convicted person can be freed and compensated, the dead cannot.
It can be difficult to reconcile this approach with a universalist morality, so I completely understand if you'd still rather just shoot them from the get-go than go for outlawry and exile. It's just my personal position and not one I'd expect other people to understand or adopt.
Personally, I would rather maintain a very limited and humane system of prisons or mental asylums for the incarceration of the perhaps a fraction of percent of society who are uncontrollably violent (other countries have much more human prison systems than the United States, so it is possible, and has been demonstrated to be feasible in a modern industrialized nation while your alternative has not), because that is an objectively less harmful course of action than the one that you are describing.
loomer wrote: ↑2020-06-16 09:34amThe suffering is incidental and beyond the scope of the exile, not part of the sentence of exile.
But suffering is not incidental. It is a known, acknowledged, deliberate consequence of the policy you are describing, and therefore those advocating, implementing, or enforcing such a policy would bear responsibility for it.
I'm generally opposed to it myself - if you asked me if I'd sooner shoot them than send them to die of exposure in the desert I'd say 'yes' - but there remains a distinction between a sentence that is ambivalent to suffering and one that creates it. The scope of the law ends, quite abruptly, at outlawry - all that follows is made by the outlaw, not the law. If they live or die, die swiftly or slowly, is solely upon their own heads once they sever themselves from the community.
It is a very strange world view which says "The police and prisons should be abolished because they're abusive, racist and oppressive. Let's replace them with vigilante murders instead!"
If the sentence was an active, deliberate 'and now you have to die slowly' I'd agree with you that it's moral cowardice. But in this case it's neither moral cowardice nor moral heroism - it's simply an acceptance that, by their own hand, they are removed from the bonds governing the society constituted by the law they are now outside of, and thereby entitled to no regard, consideration, or protection by that law from whatever may come their way. In other words, if we're looking at it in terms of cowardice, it's morally ambivalent. No active physical harm is directly imposed on them by the sentence of outlawry unless they return to the community, and I'll clarify, since it may not be clear, that if you put me in charge of drafting it the policy would very much include ensuring sufficient food, transport, and water to get them to a destination rather than just ditching them in the desert and going 'later bitch'.
Death sentences are probably still cleaner, but for me it's an epistemic distinction worth preserving because of the implications on what is and is not acceptable within a community of law.
And what happens when they are deported back against their will to the community that exiled them, because predictably nobody else will take them? Does the responsibility for their death still lie on them? Or on the country that deported them? Or on the community that exiled them and is now pulling the trigger?
The purpose of such outlawry is not to reduce crime or recidivism, but to remove the hypothetical 'exceptional lunatic' - and note that this penalty is one I'm talking about only for the hypothetically rational but totally unrehabilitateable , untreatable, uncontrollable subject that I very much doubt even exists, our hypothetical genuinely 'evil' serial killer that cannot possibly be controlled in any way but execution, incarceration, or other harsh penalty that Yan introduced to justify the existence of prisons - from a society endangered by their existence. For literally everyone else, other modes focused on treatment, resolving the root causes, and rehabilitation are preferable precisely because felon status is an ineffective method of reducing crime.
I am skeptical that truly evil people exist, because I am skeptical as to whether free will exists, or whether we are all ultimately organic computers who's actions are driven by chemical reactions in our brains, in which case nobody ultimately chooses to do anything, good or bad, and the "evil" person is ultimately just a victim of nature- chance or fate, and their own malfunctioning brain biology. But we do know that there are people who are violent or abusive as a result of mental illness, and not all such conditions are, at present, reliably treatable. If you would (rightly) not sentence the mentally ill to exile or to death, or hold them responsible for their choices, but we are currently unable to reliably treat whatever is causing them to behave violently, then what alternative is available but to confine them, as comfortably and humanely as possible and only in the most severe cases, from the rest of society?
I would agree that a focus on treatment, root causes, and rehabilitation could potentially address probably upwards of 99% of crime, although there would have to be a transitional period of some years or decades as police forces and prisons were drawn down and resources invested in other areas.
However, the fact is that there is likely a small number of incurably violent people (maybe we'll be able to cure them some day, but not yet). And any system of justice would have to take those people into account, not just hand wave their existence away. And in practice, maintaining a minimal, humane system facility to contain these people would inflict less harm than establishing a system of exile and summary execution which requires unpersoning and fostering a societal indifference to human suffering in order to function, while allowing society to rationalize away responsibility for the consequences.
I think that that combination of unpersoning/othering, societal indifference to suffering, and shifting of responsibility is what worries me most, beyond the immediate harms to the people who would be sentenced to exile or death (who might or might not be responsible for their fate). Its exactly the sort of thing that, however well-meaning in its inception, would likely create a society that would rationalize all manner of atrocities against a widening number of people.
bilateralrope wrote: ↑2020-06-17 01:45amExile leads to a few problematic scenarios:
- The murder tourist. They come to the society from another country. Their plan is to kill someone for the thrill of it. If they get caught, their plan is to hire a lawyer who argues for their immediate exile. And, unlike exiles born in your country, the murder tourist has a country willing to take them back.
- The hostage taker. The exiled person comes back but, before anyone kills them, they take hostages.
- The traumatized. The exiled person comes back and tries to attack someone, only for the intended victim to kill him. Unfortunately, the intended victim is traumatized over having been forced to kill someone.
- The mistaken identity. Someone was exiled. But there is an unfortunate tourist that merely looks like them. So this unfortunate tourist gets kills coming into the country by people who think he's the exiled.
The first one seems fairly outlandish, but I suppose its possible. The others are all serious obstacles, yes.
There's a lot of practical problems in how such a system would relate to other countries. If all other nations practiced the exile system, then where would an outlawed person be able to go? If others did not, it is still unlikely that they would accept an "outlawed" person (albeit some might be able to apply for refugee status, as said policy would, as noted above, be a human rights violation under international law). So they would presumably be deported home and killed. If there was nowhere for exiled people to go, then you'd potentially see gangs of exiles forming on the margins of society, raiding and killing and forcing a military response to eliminate them.
Tribble wrote: ↑2020-06-17 01:55am
Also, what about when the inevitable happens where a person was convicted, outlawed, killed, then later on was found to be innocent? Sucks to be them I guess?
One of the reasons why I oppose the death penalty in general, even via exile.
Indeed.
Personally, I am morally opposed to the death penalty as well, but the practical argument is sufficient even if one is theoretically okay with killing "deserving" people.
For all the faults of the prison system, a wrongfully-incarcerated person can, at least potentially, be freed and compensated. The dead cannot. Further, no society is ever going to be completely immune to human error, so either we have to accept that a certain number of innocent people will, in all likelihood, be murdered by society for the greater good, or we must oppose the death penalty.
"I know its easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reigned Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally, they don't. Again, 18 months before he resigned, Nixon had a sky-high approval rating of 67%. Harvey Weinstein was winning Oscars until one day, he definitely wasn't."-John Oliver
"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."-General Von Clauswitz, describing my opinion of Bernie or Busters and third partiers in a nutshell.
I SUPPORT A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE TO REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE.
