Indonesia to execute six drug offenders

[Autumnlicious]

robvalue, your statement left that open as a possibility.

Let's take a closer look at what you posted.

I've been giving this some thought, and I've come round to the idea that putting murderers to work for the community is probably a better idea than execution. Well, putting all criminals to work I guess. Why should they get to lounge around?

The problems I see with doing this for murderers are:

1) Risk to the public
2) What action is taken if they refuse to work properly / at all

I guess for the second point, we have solitary confinement or something.

Consider a "murderer" (as you put it), refusing to work. Your suggestion, denoted as #2, was to use solitary confinement.

However, if said "murderer" continues to refuse to work, repeated use of solitary confinement will add up, creating effective long term solitary confinement.

While we're on this topic, how will you handle work-related injuries from this legalized slavery? How far can you use or abuse a prisoner? Until their joints become arthritic? Past that point?

And there remains the question of what to do for someone wrongly convicted and made part of the enslaved "work" crews. Let's say they've been crippled on the job -- how are you going to give their missing limb back?

Now let's pretend we're going to reduce the type of work to an industry that, most likely, is not at risk of causing debilitating injuries. Once again, what of the fruits of poisoned labor? Would the wrongfully-convicted receive a percentage of the profits and how much would justify loss of income and emotional trauma from wrongful incarceration and wrongful forced labor?

Nothing but a minefield of bad ideas, opportunities for financing/creating a perverse incentive for wrongful convictions and an incredibly large swathe of edge cases.

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"Letting the public discuss" this?

How would you propose to regulate this speech?

By mocking foolish, half baked ideas mercilessly. What else can I do? There is nothing that prevents ones own fingers from posting drivel upon a public forum (except a sledgehammer to them).

You've a fair point about incentivizing prison labor, but given a robust adversarial court system, I'm not sure that would be such a danger as it was in, say, the Soviet Union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/....html?_r=0

?

Some robust court system.