While I don’t necessarily approve of the conclusion, there are many important points that people seem to underestimate. (Briefly, before discussing them, I suspect that what currently makes death penalty so expensive is all the legal processes around it, so if we replaced all death penalty with life sentence in prison, we would spend more money on the prisoners, but less money on the lawyers, potentially saving money on the net.)
The key part is: While the truly horrible people are few, they cause vastly disproportional damage, plus all kinds of secondary damage (the population living in fear, not trusting each other, spending more money on security, or just not trying many projects because of the perceived risk). Eliminating these people from the streets might change the situation dramatically, possibly in ways that many of us can’t even imagine. It could change a low-trust society into a high-trust society, with various positive impacts on mental health and economy.
I have also seen similar dynamics in other situations. For example, in school, there is often one child in a classroom that constantly keeps disrupting lessons, frustrating the teachers and reducing the learning opportunities for all their classmates. Removing that one child can dramatically change the entire experience for everyone involved. I have seen incredible changes during a week or two when the disruptive child got sick; but after their return the situation reverted to the usual.
There is a related problem, that crime is often difficult to prove (beyond the shadow of doubt, without doing something illegal yourself, etc.). For example, rape is often only witnessed by the two people involved; we get a “he said, she said” situation. Another example, in Slovakia the law about illegal drugs was changed so that it is no longer illegal to have the amount of drugs you need for your own consumption; only selling drugs is illegal. Sounds reasonable at first sight (catching the dealers is strategically more important than catching the users)… until you realize that in practice, selling is almost impossible to prove. Because you would have to be there, at the exact moment. A police arriving five minutes later (which is already a super optimistic scenario) can’t prove anything: all people involved will claim that no exchange happened, that everyone who has drugs on them has already arrived with them, that it is all for their personal consumption, and that all they wanted was to talk. So I have literally the situation that people are selling drugs on my street, they are not even trying hard to hide (other than making sure that no one is closer than 10 meters to them at the moment the money changes hands), and they do it with complete impunity. So again, we have a situation where worrying about being needlessly harsh to the users made the crime itself… not literally legal, but not punished in practice either.
Which suggest a need of another “tough on crime” approach, like: if X is a crime you want to prevent, but it is extremely easy to pretend that X is Y, and there is no good reason why Y should be legal… then maybe you should also make Y illegal, just to make sure that the people doing X actually get punished. Basically, when making laws about Y, don’t think about Y in isolation, but also about all things that can be plausibly made into Y. Even if the punishment for Y is smaller than the punishment for X, it should definitely be nonzero, and if it happens repeatedly, it is very likely X in disguise, so the punishments for repeated Y should be comparable to X.
While I don’t necessarily approve of the conclusion, there are many important points that people seem to underestimate. (Briefly, before discussing them, I suspect that what currently makes death penalty so expensive is all the legal processes around it, so if we replaced all death penalty with life sentence in prison, we would spend more money on the prisoners, but less money on the lawyers, potentially saving money on the net.)
The key part is: While the truly horrible people are few, they cause vastly disproportional damage, plus all kinds of secondary damage (the population living in fear, not trusting each other, spending more money on security, or just not trying many projects because of the perceived risk). Eliminating these people from the streets might change the situation dramatically, possibly in ways that many of us can’t even imagine. It could change a low-trust society into a high-trust society, with various positive impacts on mental health and economy.
I have also seen similar dynamics in other situations. For example, in school, there is often one child in a classroom that constantly keeps disrupting lessons, frustrating the teachers and reducing the learning opportunities for all their classmates. Removing that one child can dramatically change the entire experience for everyone involved. I have seen incredible changes during a week or two when the disruptive child got sick; but after their return the situation reverted to the usual.
There is a related problem, that crime is often difficult to prove (beyond the shadow of doubt, without doing something illegal yourself, etc.). For example, rape is often only witnessed by the two people involved; we get a “he said, she said” situation. Another example, in Slovakia the law about illegal drugs was changed so that it is no longer illegal to have the amount of drugs you need for your own consumption; only selling drugs is illegal. Sounds reasonable at first sight (catching the dealers is strategically more important than catching the users)… until you realize that in practice, selling is almost impossible to prove. Because you would have to be there, at the exact moment. A police arriving five minutes later (which is already a super optimistic scenario) can’t prove anything: all people involved will claim that no exchange happened, that everyone who has drugs on them has already arrived with them, that it is all for their personal consumption, and that all they wanted was to talk. So I have literally the situation that people are selling drugs on my street, they are not even trying hard to hide (other than making sure that no one is closer than 10 meters to them at the moment the money changes hands), and they do it with complete impunity. So again, we have a situation where worrying about being needlessly harsh to the users made the crime itself… not literally legal, but not punished in practice either.
Which suggest a need of another “tough on crime” approach, like: if X is a crime you want to prevent, but it is extremely easy to pretend that X is Y, and there is no good reason why Y should be legal… then maybe you should also make Y illegal, just to make sure that the people doing X actually get punished. Basically, when making laws about Y, don’t think about Y in isolation, but also about all things that can be plausibly made into Y. Even if the punishment for Y is smaller than the punishment for X, it should definitely be nonzero, and if it happens repeatedly, it is very likely X in disguise, so the punishments for repeated Y should be comparable to X.
I think for similar reasons trade in ivory from dead anyways elephants is severely restricted.