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Lebanon’s parliament abolished the death penalty, making it the first country in the Arab world to replace the sentencing with life imprisonment with aggravated hard labor (apnews.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/world
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[–] 27 points 3 months ago (13 children)

There are two reasons why life with hard labor is a better solution than the death penalty:

  1. If at any point you discover the person is innocent, you can free them and at least ATTEMPT restitution. If you've killed them then that's impossible.

  2. It's a better deterrent since people are more scared of it.

The only advantage the death penalty MIGHT have is being cheaper. And I'm not even sure about that.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago* (7 children)

    It's pretty much torture in many, MANY prison systems. Not to mention overused solitary confinement which is literal torture. So being tortured for your entire life instead of killed seems like a much harsher and inhumane punishment. Not to mention the guard abuse, abuse from others, etc...

    There is also no restitution for losing 20-40 years of your life in a failed system.

    Especially because the system is literally rigged against those who do possibly get out after being proved innocent.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    It’s pretty much torture in many, MANY prison systems. Not to mention overused solitary confinement which is literal torture. So being tortured for your entire life instead of killed seems like a much harsher and inhumane punishment. Not to mention the guard abuse, abuse from others, etc…

    These are not inherent to life with hard labor. "You shouldn't leave your house because you MIGHT get murdered" is not a sufficient argument against leaving your house. You can leave your house without getting murdered, therefore it is possible to separate the two, so attempts to avoid one should not require avoiding the other.

    If your problem with life sentences is that sometimes people get tortured in various ways, then the logical solution is to simply get rid of the torture.

    Now, if your actual issue is that you disagree with ANY kind of punishment, then that argument at least holds more water, since I can't definitively say that punishment actually works. It might, it might not, but if we assume that it does, then a life sentence has more logic behind it than a death sentence. And if we assume that it doesn't, then a death sentence is WAY worse.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Agreed, no matter if you're guilty or not, the fact you had problems concerning the law will mess you up for good. This involves many factors both intrinsic and extrinsic so the system guarantees you'd live on as a person that'll be forever guilty.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Are we still talking about Lebanon?

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    At this point its more like the whole concept of prisons in general.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Sure, but you're talking about "the system" as if every country was exactly the same. Different countries handle rehabilitation differently, and not every country has the same disclosure requirements (for example). We're talking about a spectrum here. If you're gonna talk about how "the system" works, we need to be on the same page as to what we're talking about - specifically, WHERE we're talking about. Talking in generalities can make things too abstract and confusing.

    A case study can help illustrate what you're talking about. For example, are we talking about the UK? Or are we talking about the USA? Or are we talking about Lebanon? Because I suspect "the system" means drastically different things depending on the answer.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, but you're disregarding the whole meaning of the thread. Generality is the focus here not a distinct prison system specifically.

    Paraphrasing a comment, there is no way to reverse damage done to a person across 20 years - this isn't just a prison problem but a problem which stretches way further, by intrinsic and extrinsic variables and isnt just limited to a nationality - but happens worldwide.

    I do advise to reread the thread, as threads do have the capacity to branch off the main post (conceptually) - unless you replied to the wrong comment.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Paraphrasing a comment, there is no way to reverse damage done to a person across 20 years - this isn’t just a prison problem but a problem which stretches way further, by intrinsic and extrinsic variables and isnt just limited to a nationality - but happens worldwide.

    Obviously there's no way to reverse time but you can do a damn sight more than you could if they were dead.

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