> My point is that you have a solution which, correct me if I am wrong, is 'let them out because we can't jail them forever because we don't have room, so then we have to put them on a registry'.

You’re wrong, so let me correct you. As per my previous comments, I’d be perfectly happy executing the lot of them. I don’t think that’s politically feasible, so as a compromise, I would be satisfied building as many prisons as are necessary to incarcerate them for life. But even that is politically infeasible, largely due to widespread misconceptions about the bogeyman of “mass incarceration”—including the misperception that mass incarceration is primarily a consequence of drug prohibition. So now that we’re backed into the corner where rapists and child molesters are eventually released from prison anyway, I much prefer them to be registered as sex offenders than for them not to be registered as sex offenders.

Since Anthony has some sort of problem with sex offender registration and was the one to suggest life imprisonment in the first case, I pointed out that the natural consequence of such a policy would be the expansion of “mass incarceration”. I wanted to see if Anthony was serious enough about life imprisonment to accept the necessary tradeoffs of such a policy. He replied by claiming that mass incarceration is the consequence of drug prohibition and that the required prison capacity could be freed up by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. This claim is false and I refuted it.

> I shouldn't have bothered pointing out your statistics are pointless

No, you shouldn’t have, because they aren’t. The point was to refute Anthony’s claims that mass incarceration is the consequence of drug prohibition and that the required prison capacity could be freed up by releasing nonviolent drug offenders. If you would like to refute my refutation, please feel welcome to introduce whatever data and analysis you have toward that end. I only ask that you put forth the effort yourself instead of gesturing vaguely in the direction of a refutation and then scolding me for not doing the work of presenting your side of the argument.

> Sex offender recidivism is a complicated topic that is very difficult to study, and 'sex offenses' are not something that are standardized between societies or systems, and acting like your solution is a decent one means that you think that a simple solution can solve a complex problem.

The rate of recidivism among dead men is zero, and while lifelong prisoners do engage in recidivism against other prisoners, at least they aren’t committing crimes against the rest of society. So there actually are relatively simple solutions available to us. If we are all in agreement that we are willing to bite the bullet and increase the scale of either the death penalty of mass incarceration, I would be satisfied.

When people object to sex offender registration by asking “why are we releasing them from prison in the first place?”, I am not actually convinced that they are serious about lifelong incarceration. I worry that they are using this point as a rhetorical cudgel and have no intention of actually accepting a policy of lifetime incarceration for sex offenders, especially when such a policy would likely conflict with what I reasonably presume to be their attitudes about “mass incarceration”. Now, maybe my presumption was wrong and Anthony is actually totally fine with mass incarceration, but if that were the case he would have said so. Instead, he introduced the canard that mass incarceration was the consequence of drug prohibition. He provided zero data to back up this claim and the data I provided refutes it. Anthony had no response and your responses have been little more than pointless bromides about how these issues are “complicated” with next to no data or analysis on your part about what these complications might be or why they would change our conclusions.

> Thus any conversation you are going to have on the topic is going to be fruitless unless you are trying to push an agenda with no regard for a real path forward.

Between the two of us, you’re the one who is struggling to contribute anything that could make this conversation fruitful. I hope I’ve clarified my position well enough for you to add something of substance. For one, I’m not actually clear on what specific position you’re taking here, other than “against Phil”. Perhaps this is another presumption on my part, but I assume that when people argue with me, it’s because there’s some point they disagree with me on. So what is it?