Taking someone's life through a death sentence or a whole-life prison term will never bring restoration to the family of the victim.
So do away with most whole-life sentences. Restore decent parole opportunities. That's what happens in almost every other civilized country, allowing almost all prisoners an opportunity to reform.
The rise in supermax prisons has way more to do with the potential profit for the commercial prison industry than it has to do with crime.
I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently. A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit. The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates. As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.
> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt
False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.
Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion
He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.
Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.
Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.
So, you don't actually steal it. You blow it up, along with the site itself. Cause safety system failure and cause a meltdown. If you don't plan to survive the attack, you can certainly use a nuclear plant itself as a sort of weapon.
You say it like that would be easy. It wouldn't. Nuclear power plants have significant numbers of armed guards who run drills against adversary teams trying to do just that sort of thing; a factor that's very important, but omitted due to the nature of my previous point.
I'd also like to point out there is a short supply of suicide attackers who have any sort of real capacity to run a mission. 9/11 was the last time anyone with more than five brain cells willingly died in an attack. There's been the occasional unwilling but reasonably intelligent suicide bomber, but a guy like that ain't doing much besides driving a car up to a target.
If you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it.
Now, let's assume you had access to the fuel long enough to get it out of the pool. You would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 36 seconds; enough to kill you within a month. Even if death doesn't come for weeks, you would be rapidly debilitated- which of course would leave you immobile next to something giving off massive amounts of radiation, so I imagine you'd be dead-dead within a half hour. Probably much less.
Now, there is spent fuel that's had several years to decay sitting in dry storage on most nuclear sites, but they're kept in casks and bunkers which are so robust, you're not going to be able to steal or breach them in less time than it takes for three states worth of Law Enforcement and FBI to come crashing down on your party.
That fuel in dry storage would still kill you, but it would take longer.
If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day.
I don't contest the logic of this statement in and of itself, but I do wonder were this kind of thinking ends. The Government has it's own critical tasks to perform, and officials should focus their efforts on, well, governing what they're supposed to look after. Should the government build it's own office chairs? It's own cars? How about servers? Handguns?
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion