Frankly, I'm disgusted by the vast majority of the things you're saying here -- and not just by the suggestions of corporal and capital punishment, which are inhumane things that have no place in...
Exemplary
Frankly, I'm disgusted by the vast majority of the things you're saying here -- and not just by the suggestions of corporal and capital punishment, which are inhumane things that have no place in modern society. But also things like calling prison "more of a leisure camp" and insisting that people claiming unemployment are lazy and committing brazen abuse of welfare systems (and this therefore means they're criminals? unclear where the connection is to punishing criminals other than a disdain for the poor). This is gross rhetoric that betrays a frankly horrifying and unfeeling attitude towards one's fellow human beings, especially when paired with "the solution is severe injuries even for extremely minor crimes and executions that don't even pretend to be remotely humane for offenses that don't even reach the level of murder".
I am uncomfortable seeing people openly spread views like this on Tildes, and the calls for horrific violent punishments elevate the degree to which I find a post like this disgusting. I would leave the site if posts like this were even a regular occurrence here, and this is the type of post that makes me understand why Tildes didn't have a group like ~society until recently.
Since I can't report a topic itself as malice to make sure @Deimos has seen it and is keeping tabs on the comments, I'm tagging him here. Even though there aren't many comments yet, I suspect this will be a topic that at minimum needs to be very carefully monitored.
Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency...
Exemplary
Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency that you have now, what would have had to have happened to you?
People don't generally take up shop lifting or drug dealing for fun or over other plausible options for what they could be doing. Armed robbery is not a good time for anyone involved. These are things people do for lack of alternatives. The world is getting worse for the people committing the crimes, and leaving them with no good legitimate options.
Punishments in general make this problem worse. If you were struggling to make rent with your bad job before you went to prison, when you get out you now have no house and no job to make rent with. Is a person you cut the hand off of more or less likely to get a job than they were before? Is threatening to maybe break the arm of someone who will not eat or who cannot advance unless they do the thing you do not like actually going to change behavior?
(Also, among adults, punishments as a concept are inappropriate. The state is not your real dad.)
I think you are applying the terrible social welfare system statistics to the wrong model. People aren't weirdly lazy, causing use of the social welfare system, and also weirdly evil, causing a lot of crime. People are poor, which causes both use of the social welfare system (which is what it's for), and also crime (because it doesn't properly solve the problem).
To implement social decency back into a deprived area, stop depriving the area.
Also, OP, may I suggest that if you find yourself feeling down because of the news etc, you try stepping away from it for a while? During the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, reading the...
Exemplary
Also, OP, may I suggest that if you find yourself feeling down because of the news etc, you try stepping away from it for a while?
During the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, reading the fear mongering news was such a strain on my mental health that I decided to simply... Stop... I filter out ALL politics and news. And I've found that for these past 4 years, it has had ZERO CONSEQUENCES whatsoever.
Well, except for the part where I'm generally much more relaxed and happy. If there's anything REALLY important, someone will let me know. I practice the same principle for my work/life balance in that I refuse to look at emails or messages after I'm done for the day - if there's ever an emergency, they have my phone number, they can call.
The deep lack of empathy on display here is far more frightening than a low income area with relatively high crime. This is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of the worst sort of thinking -...
The deep lack of empathy on display here is far more frightening than a low income area with relatively high crime.
This is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of the worst sort of thinking - because it's "just a hypothetical" but one that treats humans like bad code.
I think capital punishment has no place in a society that doesn't have a 100% accurate legal system, simple as that. Because even if it's 99.9% accurate, that's still creates a lot of room to kill...
I think capital punishment has no place in a society that doesn't have a 100% accurate legal system, simple as that. Because even if it's 99.9% accurate, that's still creates a lot of room to kill people that are innocent. And death, unlike life in prison, is not reversible.
Fully agree with this. There is never, under any circumstance, a morally right reason to murder someone for a criminal offense. I would also add, from a practical point of view, you only need to...
Fully agree with this. There is never, under any circumstance, a morally right reason to murder someone for a criminal offense.
I would also add, from a practical point of view, you only need to look at the USA where they still have capital punishments in some states. If you igore morality, the amount of MONEY that it costs to put someone to death vs. a life sentence is absolutely insane, and it's also a giant strain on the legal systems resources. That makes it not even worth it from a bettering-of-society standpoint.
While I think the economic argument is strong in practical debates about capital punishment, I don't think it's necessarily going to convince someone who advocates for people being stoned in the...
While I think the economic argument is strong in practical debates about capital punishment, I don't think it's necessarily going to convince someone who advocates for people being stoned in the street.
Oh yeah no totally, but from my own view - even if i could be convinced from a moral point, its just so incredibly impractical you couldn't even say it would be better for society in any way,...
Oh yeah no totally, but from my own view - even if i could be convinced from a moral point, its just so incredibly impractical you couldn't even say it would be better for society in any way, simply from how much implementation would cost to begin with.
Oh yeah, I think this is absolutely true for capital punishment practically, and it's an argument I've used in the past with conservative relatives. I think it's a good way to get otherwise...
Oh yeah, I think this is absolutely true for capital punishment practically, and it's an argument I've used in the past with conservative relatives. I think it's a good way to get otherwise reasonable people who don't see the moral arguments against capital punishment on board with abolishing it. I just think OP is... very much not that. Plus, maybe stoning in public would be cheaper 🙄
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."...
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
-Gandalf, in one of my favorite lines in literature.
There is no evidence that justice systems focussed on punishment do better than those focussed on rehabilitation. In fact, last time I checked there is a bunch of research comparing the two...
There is no evidence that justice systems focussed on punishment do better than those focussed on rehabilitation. In fact, last time I checked there is a bunch of research comparing the two approaches, and most of it suggests that focusing on rehabilitation tends to lower re-offending more effectively than a system built mostly around punishment. Many studies measure recidivism. Meaning, the rate at which released offenders commit new crimes. These figures often come out lower in places that invest in education, mental health, and job training for inmates.
In other words, no, I don't think capital and corporal punishment has any merit.
That said, deterrence can work in certain areas. For example, scaling fines based on income has been shown to be more effective in reducing repeat offenses. But extreme physical punishments? There’s no evidence they do anything but create more violence.
Frankly, the scene you are sketching out is a failure of a society at large where harsher response to harsh conditions realistically only will make things worse.
Effectively you’re setting people up to react emotionally while framing it as logic. When you frame it like you did it is very easy to forget the underlying issues and just focus on the symptoms. Which only serves to worsen things.
Leaving aside the unfair and uncharitable, not to mention unrealistic (you throw out "no chance of being wrong" awfully casually), assumptions here I object to the wishes for violent punishment....
Leaving aside the unfair and uncharitable, not to mention unrealistic (you throw out "no chance of being wrong" awfully casually), assumptions here I object to the wishes for violent punishment.
Threats of harsh and severe punishment are often not actually a deterrent for violent crimes because the person comitting the violent act in the first place is not weighing all the possibilities and options when they do it. That's just plainly not how people work, especially when they're doing impulsive, rash, passion-driven, desperate things, or when they're not of sound mind in the first place. (You want to talk about people rationally weighing incentives and deliberately choosing an antisocial course of action, look at white-collar crime...)
Even if they were, I think it is wrong and bad for our society to visit these harms on people, not much less wrong than the crime was in the first place. I think the state killing and threatening to kill criminals makes our society a more unforgiving place. It performs violence as a way to solve problems. It gives people tacit approval to use violence to solve their problems. I don't think that stoning people or feeding them into a tyre shredder does anything to stop crime or improve society, I don't think it would make Bradford a safer place, and I think it only serves to feed a bloodlust that we should starve.
That's to say: even if it was always applied to people who were truly guilty, and even if it did actually deter crime, I still would not want it to happen.
Yeah I'm not going to dive in to this that deep, everyone else has covered the "this is really fucked up" angle, and this part: in my mind eliminates this from every being realistic to enforce at...
Yeah I'm not going to dive in to this that deep, everyone else has covered the "this is really fucked up" angle, and this part:
How would you feel if laws were changed so that "eye for an eye" level of corporal and capital punishment was brought in? We're talking 100% on camera, identified, and even DNA evidence before these are enforced, no chance of being wrong.
in my mind eliminates this from every being realistic to enforce at that level, especially with the many times a wrongfully accused man has been executed for murder, nor do I believe the police to always carry out their investigation in such a precise and honest way, given the many failures of police officers and departments on that front in the past.
So I'm just going to pose: what happens if it doesn't end up working out and lower the rate of shoplifting, and instead you now just have a lot of people with a criminal record and missing a hand? In this hypothetical of yours, how do you envision that society turning out? Does it turn out better for the people involved? Does it turn out better for society as a whole?
This proposition is highly unethical and frankly the whole argumentation seems to be in bad faith. I do not know what the real reason is that you’re posting this. If you’re truly wondering what...
This proposition is highly unethical and frankly the whole argumentation seems to be in bad faith. I do not know what the real reason is that you’re posting this. If you’re truly wondering what would be a good system, read up how Norway treats their prisoners
The other commenters here have thoroughly examined how unethical and abhorrent this proposal is. I’m adding that your assumptions are also wrong. The police have always been fairly unhelpful to...
The other commenters here have thoroughly examined how unethical and abhorrent this proposal is.
I’m adding that your assumptions are also wrong.
The western world seems to be going through a change, where a few police were enough to deter a lot of crime. Now, many crimes go unpunished or even uninvestigated because they're seen as more of an insurance problem. If you've had your car broken into or maybe even your house, the police have next to no interest and cannot wait to issue that crime number so you can sort it with the insurance company instead.
The police have always been fairly unhelpful to those without money, and the police remain extremely helpful to the privileged in at least American society.
I’m wondering where you got the impression that this used to be different. My family talks about home and car break-ins they experienced from back in the 60s and 70s and they did not find the police helpful then either.
One of the most underlying issues is the laziness and brazen abuse of the social welfare systems.
Social welfare programs do cost more than they used to. I suspect this is more because more programs exist than used to; people have always been poor. It’s not like it’s easy to live off of these programs or easy to live off of minimum wage; I’d recommend trying to see how you would allocate spending on a welfare budget or a low-wage budget and you’d understand people are not incentivized to stop working to be on these programs.
If the punishments didn't stop the crime, how could you implement social decency back into an area that is so deprived, crime-ridden and abusing the social welfare system so badly?
You may ask why I'm posting this, and the answer is simply because the world seems to be getting worse.
The world does indeed seem to be getting worse. The catch: it isn’t actually.
The Illusion of Moral Decline is one of the coolest papers I’ve ever read, and Adam Mastroianni is awesome for having posted a blog write-up of it.
Everyone thinks the world is getting worse, or is losing “social decency”, or some other moral decline. They believe this with some conviction despite strong evidence to the contrary, and they consistently believe this decline began the day they were born, and has worsened ever since. This phenomena is also fairly resilient to any changes to the question.
So, rest well knowing that your brain is literally programmed to believe the world is getting worse, even when it isn’t.
Adam also links The Better Angels of Our Nature in that blog post, which explores the historic decline of violent crime we’re currently experiencing in modern society. It’s true this book was published in 2011, but the book also explores how we felt the world was getting more violent then in spite of lack of evidence. I suspect the same is true today.
I believe OP is in the UK. The police here are different to American cops. They are mostly pretty helpful to everyone that they can be (not saying they're perfect, of course, and there are plenty...
The police have always been fairly unhelpful to those without money, and the police remain extremely helpful to the privileged in at least American society.
I’m wondering where you got the impression that this used to be different. My family talks about home and car break-ins they experienced from back in the 60s and 70s and they did not find the police helpful then either.
I believe OP is in the UK. The police here are different to American cops. They are mostly pretty helpful to everyone that they can be (not saying they're perfect, of course, and there are plenty of issues with the police force both with individuals and structurally). It's worth noting their job is not the same as US police - their primary role is keeping the peace, not enforcing the law. Although obviously they do the latter too. I definitely remember a time in my life where police would come out to every call (once I had the police called on me for playing cricket in the street with some neighbourhood kids, the coppers stayed and played a bit with us) and I'm not that old.
However, the police force has been horribly underfunded for 15+ years (pure co-incidence that's the length of the last Conservative administration I'm sure) so they have had to prioritise violent and dangerous crimes over investigating break-ins and theft and so on. Report a break in and you probably will just get a crime number to make an insurance claim, but that's because the cops are pursuing crimes where people have been hurt or worse.
One of the most underlying issues is the laziness and brazen abuse of the social welfare systems.
The Department for Work and Pensions estimate the fraud rate of benefit claims to be less than 4%. We should be celebrating such a ludicrous success rate of 96%, but the gutter press in the UK are obsessed with claiming benefit fraud is everywhere and it's become a pervasive complaint among people too lazy to check facts.
I should clarify what I meant when I described unequal treatment across wealth lines in the US. At least where I’ve lived, the effectiveness of a police department correlates very strongly with...
The police here are different to American cops. They are mostly pretty helpful to everyone that they can be (not saying they're perfect, of course, and there are plenty of issues with the police force both with individuals and structurally).
I should clarify what I meant when I described unequal treatment across wealth lines in the US. At least where I’ve lived, the effectiveness of a police department correlates very strongly with the wealth of the area they are located. This is probably a combination of lower crime rates in wealthier areas and police funding coming from local taxes, which means departments’ funding is directly correlated with local income levels.
I don’t know enough to claim a solution for this problem (I don’t fall on either “increase funding” or “decrease funding”), but the discrepancy certainly exists in the USA.
I am completely against this idea. I'll make my point quite plainly. No human, under any circumstances, has the inalienable right to kill another human. That is my moral code. Adding the state's...
I am completely against this idea. I'll make my point quite plainly. No human, under any circumstances, has the inalienable right to kill another human. That is my moral code.
Adding the state's monopoly on violence doesn't change the equation at all. Furthermore, as a citizen, I accede to the state's authority and thus provide it my portion of its legitimacy. I would argue that when the state kills a human, in a representative democracy, that blood is on my hands.
I don't like killing people through my tax dollars. It is morally abhorrent, in any modality.
I will preemptively answer every whataboutism strawman in one fell swoop. No matter the crime: the perpetrator is removed from society, society pays for their monitoring and their sustenance. The perpetraitor will serve out the required sentence by law and then be returned to society when their debt is paid.
Frankly, I'm disgusted by the vast majority of the things you're saying here -- and not just by the suggestions of corporal and capital punishment, which are inhumane things that have no place in modern society. But also things like calling prison "more of a leisure camp" and insisting that people claiming unemployment are lazy and committing brazen abuse of welfare systems (and this therefore means they're criminals? unclear where the connection is to punishing criminals other than a disdain for the poor). This is gross rhetoric that betrays a frankly horrifying and unfeeling attitude towards one's fellow human beings, especially when paired with "the solution is severe injuries even for extremely minor crimes and executions that don't even pretend to be remotely humane for offenses that don't even reach the level of murder".
I am uncomfortable seeing people openly spread views like this on Tildes, and the calls for horrific violent punishments elevate the degree to which I find a post like this disgusting. I would leave the site if posts like this were even a regular occurrence here, and this is the type of post that makes me understand why Tildes didn't have a group like ~society until recently.
Since I can't report a topic itself as malice to make sure @Deimos has seen it and is keeping tabs on the comments, I'm tagging him here. Even though there aren't many comments yet, I suspect this will be a topic that at minimum needs to be very carefully monitored.
Have you tried asking people why they're committing crimes? If you found yourself doing those crimes, with roughly the same system of values, strength of character, and sense of common decency that you have now, what would have had to have happened to you?
People don't generally take up shop lifting or drug dealing for fun or over other plausible options for what they could be doing. Armed robbery is not a good time for anyone involved. These are things people do for lack of alternatives. The world is getting worse for the people committing the crimes, and leaving them with no good legitimate options.
Punishments in general make this problem worse. If you were struggling to make rent with your bad job before you went to prison, when you get out you now have no house and no job to make rent with. Is a person you cut the hand off of more or less likely to get a job than they were before? Is threatening to maybe break the arm of someone who will not eat or who cannot advance unless they do the thing you do not like actually going to change behavior?
(Also, among adults, punishments as a concept are inappropriate. The state is not your real dad.)
I think you are applying the terrible social welfare system statistics to the wrong model. People aren't weirdly lazy, causing use of the social welfare system, and also weirdly evil, causing a lot of crime. People are poor, which causes both use of the social welfare system (which is what it's for), and also crime (because it doesn't properly solve the problem).
To implement social decency back into a deprived area, stop depriving the area.
Also, OP, may I suggest that if you find yourself feeling down because of the news etc, you try stepping away from it for a while?
During the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, reading the fear mongering news was such a strain on my mental health that I decided to simply... Stop... I filter out ALL politics and news. And I've found that for these past 4 years, it has had ZERO CONSEQUENCES whatsoever.
Well, except for the part where I'm generally much more relaxed and happy. If there's anything REALLY important, someone will let me know. I practice the same principle for my work/life balance in that I refuse to look at emails or messages after I'm done for the day - if there's ever an emergency, they have my phone number, they can call.
The deep lack of empathy on display here is far more frightening than a low income area with relatively high crime.
This is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of the worst sort of thinking - because it's "just a hypothetical" but one that treats humans like bad code.
I think capital punishment has no place in a society that doesn't have a 100% accurate legal system, simple as that. Because even if it's 99.9% accurate, that's still creates a lot of room to kill people that are innocent. And death, unlike life in prison, is not reversible.
Fully agree with this. There is never, under any circumstance, a morally right reason to murder someone for a criminal offense.
I would also add, from a practical point of view, you only need to look at the USA where they still have capital punishments in some states. If you igore morality, the amount of MONEY that it costs to put someone to death vs. a life sentence is absolutely insane, and it's also a giant strain on the legal systems resources. That makes it not even worth it from a bettering-of-society standpoint.
While I think the economic argument is strong in practical debates about capital punishment, I don't think it's necessarily going to convince someone who advocates for people being stoned in the street.
Oh yeah no totally, but from my own view - even if i could be convinced from a moral point, its just so incredibly impractical you couldn't even say it would be better for society in any way, simply from how much implementation would cost to begin with.
Oh yeah, I think this is absolutely true for capital punishment practically, and it's an argument I've used in the past with conservative relatives. I think it's a good way to get otherwise reasonable people who don't see the moral arguments against capital punishment on board with abolishing it. I just think OP is... very much not that. Plus, maybe stoning in public would be cheaper 🙄
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
-Gandalf, in one of my favorite lines in literature.
There is no evidence that justice systems focussed on punishment do better than those focussed on rehabilitation. In fact, last time I checked there is a bunch of research comparing the two approaches, and most of it suggests that focusing on rehabilitation tends to lower re-offending more effectively than a system built mostly around punishment. Many studies measure recidivism. Meaning, the rate at which released offenders commit new crimes. These figures often come out lower in places that invest in education, mental health, and job training for inmates.
In other words, no, I don't think capital and corporal punishment has any merit.
That said, deterrence can work in certain areas. For example, scaling fines based on income has been shown to be more effective in reducing repeat offenses. But extreme physical punishments? There’s no evidence they do anything but create more violence.
Frankly, the scene you are sketching out is a failure of a society at large where harsher response to harsh conditions realistically only will make things worse.
Effectively you’re setting people up to react emotionally while framing it as logic. When you frame it like you did it is very easy to forget the underlying issues and just focus on the symptoms. Which only serves to worsen things.
Leaving aside the unfair and uncharitable, not to mention unrealistic (you throw out "no chance of being wrong" awfully casually), assumptions here I object to the wishes for violent punishment.
Threats of harsh and severe punishment are often not actually a deterrent for violent crimes because the person comitting the violent act in the first place is not weighing all the possibilities and options when they do it. That's just plainly not how people work, especially when they're doing impulsive, rash, passion-driven, desperate things, or when they're not of sound mind in the first place. (You want to talk about people rationally weighing incentives and deliberately choosing an antisocial course of action, look at white-collar crime...)
Even if they were, I think it is wrong and bad for our society to visit these harms on people, not much less wrong than the crime was in the first place. I think the state killing and threatening to kill criminals makes our society a more unforgiving place. It performs violence as a way to solve problems. It gives people tacit approval to use violence to solve their problems. I don't think that stoning people or feeding them into a tyre shredder does anything to stop crime or improve society, I don't think it would make Bradford a safer place, and I think it only serves to feed a bloodlust that we should starve.
That's to say: even if it was always applied to people who were truly guilty, and even if it did actually deter crime, I still would not want it to happen.
Yeah I'm not going to dive in to this that deep, everyone else has covered the "this is really fucked up" angle, and this part:
in my mind eliminates this from every being realistic to enforce at that level, especially with the many times a wrongfully accused man has been executed for murder, nor do I believe the police to always carry out their investigation in such a precise and honest way, given the many failures of police officers and departments on that front in the past.
So I'm just going to pose: what happens if it doesn't end up working out and lower the rate of shoplifting, and instead you now just have a lot of people with a criminal record and missing a hand? In this hypothetical of yours, how do you envision that society turning out? Does it turn out better for the people involved? Does it turn out better for society as a whole?
This proposition is highly unethical and frankly the whole argumentation seems to be in bad faith. I do not know what the real reason is that you’re posting this. If you’re truly wondering what would be a good system, read up how Norway treats their prisoners
The other commenters here have thoroughly examined how unethical and abhorrent this proposal is.
I’m adding that your assumptions are also wrong.
The police have always been fairly unhelpful to those without money, and the police remain extremely helpful to the privileged in at least American society.
I’m wondering where you got the impression that this used to be different. My family talks about home and car break-ins they experienced from back in the 60s and 70s and they did not find the police helpful then either.
Social welfare programs do cost more than they used to. I suspect this is more because more programs exist than used to; people have always been poor. It’s not like it’s easy to live off of these programs or easy to live off of minimum wage; I’d recommend trying to see how you would allocate spending on a welfare budget or a low-wage budget and you’d understand people are not incentivized to stop working to be on these programs.
The world does indeed seem to be getting worse. The catch: it isn’t actually.
The Illusion of Moral Decline is one of the coolest papers I’ve ever read, and Adam Mastroianni is awesome for having posted a blog write-up of it.
Everyone thinks the world is getting worse, or is losing “social decency”, or some other moral decline. They believe this with some conviction despite strong evidence to the contrary, and they consistently believe this decline began the day they were born, and has worsened ever since. This phenomena is also fairly resilient to any changes to the question.
So, rest well knowing that your brain is literally programmed to believe the world is getting worse, even when it isn’t.
Adam also links The Better Angels of Our Nature in that blog post, which explores the historic decline of violent crime we’re currently experiencing in modern society. It’s true this book was published in 2011, but the book also explores how we felt the world was getting more violent then in spite of lack of evidence. I suspect the same is true today.
I believe OP is in the UK. The police here are different to American cops. They are mostly pretty helpful to everyone that they can be (not saying they're perfect, of course, and there are plenty of issues with the police force both with individuals and structurally). It's worth noting their job is not the same as US police - their primary role is keeping the peace, not enforcing the law. Although obviously they do the latter too. I definitely remember a time in my life where police would come out to every call (once I had the police called on me for playing cricket in the street with some neighbourhood kids, the coppers stayed and played a bit with us) and I'm not that old.
However, the police force has been horribly underfunded for 15+ years (pure co-incidence that's the length of the last Conservative administration I'm sure) so they have had to prioritise violent and dangerous crimes over investigating break-ins and theft and so on. Report a break in and you probably will just get a crime number to make an insurance claim, but that's because the cops are pursuing crimes where people have been hurt or worse.
The Department for Work and Pensions estimate the fraud rate of benefit claims to be less than 4%. We should be celebrating such a ludicrous success rate of 96%, but the gutter press in the UK are obsessed with claiming benefit fraud is everywhere and it's become a pervasive complaint among people too lazy to check facts.
I should clarify what I meant when I described unequal treatment across wealth lines in the US. At least where I’ve lived, the effectiveness of a police department correlates very strongly with the wealth of the area they are located. This is probably a combination of lower crime rates in wealthier areas and police funding coming from local taxes, which means departments’ funding is directly correlated with local income levels.
I don’t know enough to claim a solution for this problem (I don’t fall on either “increase funding” or “decrease funding”), but the discrepancy certainly exists in the USA.
I am completely against this idea. I'll make my point quite plainly. No human, under any circumstances, has the inalienable right to kill another human. That is my moral code.
Adding the state's monopoly on violence doesn't change the equation at all. Furthermore, as a citizen, I accede to the state's authority and thus provide it my portion of its legitimacy. I would argue that when the state kills a human, in a representative democracy, that blood is on my hands.
I don't like killing people through my tax dollars. It is morally abhorrent, in any modality.
I will preemptively answer every whataboutism strawman in one fell swoop. No matter the crime: the perpetrator is removed from society, society pays for their monitoring and their sustenance. The perpetraitor will serve out the required sentence by law and then be returned to society when their debt is paid.