Rapists

[DeistPaladin]

I mean, you can recover from rape; you can't recover from murder.

I don't think it's about the recovery of the survivor of the attack but how sociopathic the perp is and therefore how dangerous that perp is to society. Prison time is not just designed to punish but also to prevent them from harming society.

There are many different scenarios under which murder might happen with a huge variety of motivations. This is why we punish pre-meditated murder differently than murder in the heat of the moment. A wife who shoots her faithless husband upon finding him in bed with another woman one day is generally treated differently than one who planned and poisoned her husband after taking out a big life insurance policy on him.

There are also extreme scenarios where I find murder understandable, though not entirely justified. I remember once seeing on the news a man who shot the alleged molester of his son. This murder was premeditated. Was the outraged father wrong for taking the law into his own hands? Yes. He should have had more faith in the system. Nonetheless, it's hard for me to consider him to be evil or dangerous to society. Psychological evaluation and treatment would be more appropriate than hard time in this case, in my opinion.

By contrast, there are no conditions under which I could consider rape to be either justifiable or understandable. Neither does it make much moral difference if the rape is pre-meditated or just happens in the moment. Rape is an inherently sociopathic crime while murder might not be.

Some murderers are serial but not all. By contrast, the repeat offender rate for rapists is quite high, last I checked. The repeat offender rate for child molesters is 100%. You do not rehabilitate a child molester. They will strike again if they are able.

It is for these reasons that I consider rapists to be more inherently dangerous to society and thus need to be put away for longer periods.