Death Penalty

My case for the death penalty isn't that some crimes are so egregious that they deserve death, or that victims of horrible crimes deserve retribution, nor even that harsh punishments create an effective deterrent discouraging illicit behaviours. For although all these defences might be quite cogent, the issue is less simple than that. I will argue that polity should have the right to manage their biopolitical populations (that is, the right to decide who should live and die within a community for the benefits of that community). Now, your immediate response to this might be... no! You're advocating Nazism! Selective eugenics! What is best for the community might be horribly misinterpreted! And, you'd be quite right. But George Bernard Shaw wrote that society has the contractarian right ‘to put a price on the right to live in it’ (1). And do we dispute this? Social order is costly; each society asks us to pay with our freedom when it imposes laws on us in return for security and privileges. The law restricts our actions as humans and it is by conformity to this law, that we reap the benefits of society. One privilege of society is the right to live. It is the right not to be killed and to get proper care. However, it is true that when individuals take the life of another, or break the law, they cannot go without punishment. But to imprison a murderer like Charles Manson, giving them stardom and security in an, for him, economically free sanctuary does not seem at all a suitable and condign punishment. All it does, as Foucault would argue, is cement delinquent habits and behaviours. So why do we consider it a better solution that the management of population to remove criminals? It is because we are deluded; we apply our value on human life and the unnatural preservation of this life at all costs across of all society, actuated from our shared human fear of death. Already, by advocating that the death penalty be abolished, are we asserting a power over life and death. We deny people their right to die. Take the UK (my place of origin), euthanasia is illegal under the 1961 Suicide Act (2) despite some public sympathy. We say to people that no matter how much pain they are in, how they are feeling, they are patients to be cured. Palliatives will soothe them into a life-in-death with an abysmally low quality of life. This is, by the way, the phraseology used by solitary confinement patients: 'a living death' (3) for many a worse condemnation than actual death itself. In a closed space, without intersubjectivity, convicts can lose the habitual ability of cognitive communication and therefore rhythmic cognition itself. Did you know that 41% of solitary confinement victims hallucinate? (4) That this type of imprisonment induces mental health issues? But what’s more, solitary confinement patients are also deprived of possibility, essential to their abstractive thinking, so over time must also lose the ability to create other possibilities for themselves becoming institutionalised. Even creative thoughts are a form of self-communication bereft of fuel must eventually come to a halt. In inertia, subjects will become dependent on the immediacy that has co-constituted them and which they have fine-tuned themselves around. Thus, in this way, solitary confinement becomes the instrument for the nullification of the abstract self and person as the immediacy of the controlled prison institute becomes the subject’s only reality. It limits their bodies and minds, what they believe possible, until they only project homogenised meaning. This reduced subject Gallagher calls the ‘minimal self’ (5) but is much more easily recognised as the institutionalised zombie. Surely the death penalty is a kinder solution for all these solitary confinement subjects that can't be released into a population because they are dangerous whilst simultaneously are being tortured at tax payer suspense. This is currently where people end up without the death penalty and it is plainly worse than death, it is inhumane suffering. It controls the lives of people by subjecting them to a living death in prison no better than if they were already dead themselves. Over 100,000 people spend time in solitary confinement (6); the worse the crime, the more likely one is to be put in solitary. All death row convicts tend to find themselves confined as such, a living inhumation. By denying them death, we prolong their suffering to a life-in-death and put strain on our overpopulated prison systems. The power over death is likewise not so an alienated idea from society as we think. My second point, will highlight the hypocritical nature of the death penalty in the public sphere. By definition, the death penalty is 'punishment by execution'. And I ask, how does this differ from the West’s interventionist foreign policy? When Bin Laden was shot in 2011 by US Seals, wasn’t this a death penalty the media cheered for? When terrorists, dehumanised, on the news are reported dead with a celebratory undertone, isn’t it then hypocritical to believe that use of the domestic death penalty is barbaric? All Bernard Shaw asks is that we value criminals as if they were terrorists, enemies to the state deserving of the same treatment. For Shaw the prime objective of any society ought to be the overall benefit of each citizen. When individuals break this code or aren’t being intrinsically useful, why do they have the right to live? The death penalty on a mass scale makes for a more efficient society. Imagine a society without recidivist criminals, without those who impede the social framework and without those of little use to us. This doesn't seem to me to be a dystopia but rather, a utopia. DISCLAIMER:(All views above are for the sake of arguing and are not necessarily my own) Sources: 1 Shaw, Prefaces, 1934, p. 2962 http://www.legislation.gov.uk...3 https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...4 https://www.starcafe.org...5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...6 http://solitarywatch.com...7 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com...