The job description of US criminal persecutors is wrong. People there should work into fixing it.
Fixing the system requires changing the incentives. Individuals would adjust accordingly.
Edit: It won't get fixed because ultimately the metrics trickle up to Joe Public, who is notoriously tough on crime. Lawyers had to fight popular sentiment to get rid of the death penalty in most states. Even today, between death and life imprisonment, the former is preferred by the general public.
This behaviour, by Joe Public, is a serious problem, in that it's an emotional response, not a logical one, and absolutely never based on informed debate
He cares about getting his immediate needs met.
He wants to be entertained without having to be forced to think.
He wants to see people that he's been conditioned to hate be punished.
He wants people he can look down on so he doesn't feel like he's at the bottom of the pile.
Source?
The woman defending the Death Penalty in that clip is Priti Patel, a Tory MP who was until recently in their Shadow Cabinet. You'd hope she can do better, but judging from her subsequent comments she still doesn't get it.
Now, in the UK most people with a life sentence will (after quite some time) be eligible for parole. Historically it was possible for politicians to block this, but of course the consequence is that if a particularly notorious criminal is scheduled to be paroled, politicians are under pressure to prevent that, while a criminal who didn't attract much public interest leaves on schedule - that's manifestly unfair and a European court told the Brits they can't do that, so eventually the UK's Supreme Court decided there needed to a specific rule, identify a category of people who won't be paroled, and the category they decided on was people who have been convicted of at least two separately conceived murders.
Several European countries have no life sentences. Breivik for example got 21 years, and since he's still an avowed Nazi who wants to kill more people, and will likely still be an avowed Nazi when his sentence ends, they will just hold him until he stops being a Nazi or he dies. No additional sentence needed.
[Edited: Priti left her Shadow role a few weeks ago]
Is it not just a case of "murderous lunatic remains locked in asylum after criminal sentence until cured" - which can very well be until his death?
I'm sure in his mind it makes sense. But everybody else disagrees and considers that, as you said, the murderous lunatic can't be released.
I wrote something before which didn't consider that you're modelling this as an illness. AIUI Breivik isn't mad. There's nothing wrong with him that we could cure, he's a Nazi, he genuinely believes that it's appropriate and even necessary for him to kill children that he thinks are genetically inferior.
He will die in prison not because we couldn't cure him, but because the rest of society are not Nazis and do not think we should identify some people as genetically inferior and kill them. Whether that is because it can't work (which it can't) or because its morally abhorrent doesn't matter.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/08/06/most-america...
It's a bad poll and you shouldn't base anything on it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262929/opinion-of-us-cit...
The whole system is pretty broken.
As in, just as unlikely.
To put it into a software developers context - which hopefully makes it easier to understand for some.
The law is legacy code that stretches back a few centuries (literally) that has been written by many many people with little in common, and has active users who must be consulted upon change.
Yeah, that’s working out brilliantly.
If the law cannot meaningfully accessed and practiced by the Poeple, it is not Law; it is Tyranny.