Table of Contents
As the execution of Nidal Hasan approaches, it is time to review the death penalty. The death penalty is just punishment. It improves the rehabilitation of serious offenders, forcing them to grapple with the afterlife.
America’s shift to ‘medical’ lethal injections is more painful and dangerous for prisoners and more expensive for taxpayers. Its popularity is rooted in aesthetics. We use it to allow onlookers to distance themselves from the act. Lethal injections go wrong often, and some medical experts believe the process results in a substantial amount of suffering for the condemned. Other methods, such as firing squads, are botched at a far lower rate.
Punishment
The primary goal of criminal justice is punishment. Yet within today's prison system, inmates often share uniform daily routines regardless of crime severity. Many murderers today enjoy recreational time, movies, and other amenities, luxuries that prevent the prison system from actually punishing the worst of the worst.
In his book The Death of Punishment, Robert Blecker recounts visiting prisons where inmates serving life sentences for murder appeared to enjoy relatively comfortable lives. “Inside prison, ironically, it’s nobody’s job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives.”
A good, moral justice system should punish different criminals differently according to the crimes they commit. Capital punishment does, and should, play an important role in this spectrum. It is a moral and fair punishment for those who kill and commit similarly evil crimes. When society confines murderers to relatively comfortable prisons without imposing any meaningful additional consequences, it fails in its primary responsibility and moral obligation to punish.
For some prisoners, death may be the only just punishment. People make different value judgments about what crimes deserve the death penalty, and those judgments should be debated and revisited frequently. Arguing that a specific crime should not warrant the death penalty is very different from arguing that the death penalty should be abolished. It is important that society does not use the first to justify the latter, as it too often does.
Rehabilitation
A good criminal justice system should also pursue programs that rehabilitate prisoners, both psychologically and practically.
Psychological rehabilitation is the process by which the justice system attempts to change the moral systems of inmates through education, religion, and other methods. This rehabilitation is done for the prisoner, who will live a higher, better life as a result, regardless of whether they are released from prison.
Rehabilitating prisoners in this way is crucial in ensuring a humane justice system. Plato described education as “an art of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversion of the soul.” In other words, the state educates in large part to build morals and “convert the soul.”
Those who commit murder, rape, and other serious crimes have demonstrated a profound failure of moral judgment. If their moral frameworks were sound, they would not commit such acts. Psychological, or moral, rehabilitation seeks to change the moral systems and psychological frameworks of these inmates.
Remarkably, the death penalty may be an effective tool for encouraging this process. Although it is impossible to measure precisely how many death row inmates achieve some degree of moral rehabilitation, there are indications that some confront questions of faith and morality with renewed seriousness as execution approaches.
In The Functional Use of Religion When Faced with Imminent Death: An Analysis of Death Row Inmates’ Last Statements, Ryan A. Smith found that 63% of condemned prisoners used religious language as they approached execution. Smith suggested that this language might serve a “functional” purpose, helping prisoners make sense of their circumstances and actions as death approached.
This kind of reflection, though it varies considerably from person to person, is precisely what moral rehabilitation seeks to encourage: a reconsideration of one's worldview and a serious reckoning with past actions. Death sentences create a heightened sense of urgency, giving prisoners greater reason to engage in this process, even if initially for practical reasons. This reflection represents genuine moral rehabilitation, a key aspect of a humane and good justice system.
Culture
A historical analysis of capital punishment in the United States suggests that Americans have often been more concerned with shielding themselves from the visible suffering of executions than with confronting the pain experienced by the condemned.
Lethal injections are presented as something closer to a medical procedure than an execution. Americans have increasingly prioritized the appearance of executions, avoiding the sight of bodies hanging from nooses or convulsing in electric chairs, without considering the suffering experienced by the condemned.
The sterilization of executions also distances Americans from capital punishment itself. It allows people to support and oppose the death penalty without fully confronting what it is: state-sponsored killing. Perhaps, this is one reason why Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently announced that an upcoming military execution will be livestreamed.
If America is to continue practicing capital punishment, as it should, the first step is to create a system in which Americans understand and wrestle with its moral implications. If society continues to hide from executions, citizens risk losing sight of what the death penalty actually is: punishment and rehabilitation for those who deserve and need it, nothing more and nothing less.
