If I had killed someone as a young man, had been tried and found guilty, would I prefer to spend the rest of my days in a
prison or to end it all with
death? This is the question I asked myself when approaching this essay and every way I looked at it I could not find a clear answer.
Life in prison is a wasted life. Death, apart from for the fiscal and practical reasons that keeping someone in prison entails, should be
considered only as the very final
option, as it is the very final act of one’s life. But, to me, a life in prison, with no
chance of ever leaving, would be very much worse than a lethal injection. However, I am very strongly opposed against the death penalty. How bad can life in prison be? I believe one could be able to have a fulfilling life behind bars. We can see in the Shawshank Redemption that prison is very much just an insular, much smaller world; hierarchies form, politics build up and relationships are just as complex as they are in the ‘real’ world. It seems that one could be content in prison. As the film shows, on the inside, you have the chance to be somebody much more easily whereas as soon as you can leave on parole, then you are, once more, a worthless nobody, just as you were (in most cases) before you were convicted. Of course, if you had to spend the whole of your life in a solitary cell, without the chance to be with the other prisoners, then life would lose its purpose: men are not solitary animals. In that case (as I assume would happen in maximum-security prisons) death would appeal to me a
lot more. Fifty years to brood over my mistake without any chance to prove my rehabilitation sounds to me like one sort of hell.
If the life sentence had the chance of parole the question changes slightly. A glimmer of hope means that life would be
better than death, as death should only be considered if one can never again have control of one’s life. Hope is a very important idea. A man will go through a lot if he has the possibility of getting out of his predicament at the end. Death should be treated as the final option and any chance of regaining your life is preferable to ending it; after all, one can die at any time so why bring death about on purpose?
We do not take in to account the possibility that after death things could, theoretically, be a lot worse than they are in life. Whilst alive, we know what will happen, but no-one has ever come back from the dead to tell us what happens then. This metaphysical point of view is certainly a more abstract argument but I think it should be considered. This certainty of life in prison, with television, beds and regular food is a safe option; one is hedging one’s bets by staying alive and not facing the possible terror that death could bring. Yet, you are still avoiding the inevitable.
I have not yet considered this from the other side of the fence. Many of the men who go into prison are irredeemably evil; we hear horror stories all the time about men who have killed thirty little girls. Many would feel that these men don’t deserve life and, indeed, they most probably don’t. The public would be divided on this issue. We could let them suffer the rest of their lives in prison or kill them immediately, saving the taxpayer’s money and reassuring the extended victims of their crimes (the families, for example) that these men can never get into society again. In fact, it would be preferable to society if these men were simply killed.
To review my original question again, it seems that life in prison is a better option for the prisoner. The chance of parole gives some hope and a possibility of reintegration into society. What lies beyond death, though some would argue it to be a nonsensical point, is enough to put me off what would be an assisted suicide. For the country which houses these criminals, the death penalty is a better option from several practical points of view (though I, personally, am against it). I suppose, really, that it depends which side of the bars you are sitting on.
More summaries about the Is life in prison better than the death sentence?