> If you have a captured criminal, they pose no threat to ~anyone and no threat to your society at large.
Is that true? Prisoners attack guards all the time. Prison guards actually have a statistically shortened lifespan as a result of stress presumably because of the danger. Prisoners can also attack other prisoners. A captured criminal could also be a famous or powerful person like Osama Bin Laden or a cartel boss and they could still run things from the prison or foment violence and revolution from supporters outside the prison.
They at least have a very reduced ability to hurt anyone, to the point where most of the moral arguments seem like a _big_ stretch. Some random guy who's just vaguely unpleasant to be around is almost certainly damaging society more than the worst prisoner. Should we kill them too?
Prison guards do badly mostly because our prisons are shit. Too few guards, too little pay, too few resources, no societal will to improve anything.
> A captured criminal could also be a famous or powerful person like Osama Bin Laden or a cartel boss and they could still run things from the prison or foment violence and revolution from supporters outside the prison.
In that case, the moral arguments start to be similar maybe, where prison isn't effectively stopping someone's evil actions enough.
Yes, I think this is the crux. There are a number of edge cases. I also don't mean to muddle issues but there are actually more homicides in prisons per year than there are capital punishments[1] but this issue doesn't get much attention. I am not arguing that capital punishment would prevent this issue (although I am very interested in knowing the likelihood of people with life sentences murdering behind bars versus the rest). That is why I have made this argument. I don't see how it's possible for a prison to stop someone who is motivated and dangerous (or has a dangerous following). I also don't think a crime should give you notoriety and fandom esp. in particularly bad cases like with serial killers . These cases are very rare though so I am not making any argument about how often capital punishment should happen just that there are cases where I see it as being perfectly moral and this assumes specifically that it is very difficult or impossible to totally isolate someone from the world, too expensive to do so, or possibly even that is a worse punishment than just executing them. I don't know that this has really been achieved ever.
Is that true? Prisoners attack guards all the time. Prison guards actually have a statistically shortened lifespan as a result of stress presumably because of the danger. Prisoners can also attack other prisoners. A captured criminal could also be a famous or powerful person like Osama Bin Laden or a cartel boss and they could still run things from the prison or foment violence and revolution from supporters outside the prison.