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His job is not to solve social problems, it is to coerce criminals into following the laws of civilization. I have little sympathy for their murdering lives, they forfeited this when they chose to kill.

Well, I like my idea of deporting them to Africa although High Tech Redneck (I'm using a single message for two replies) says Africa would riot. Still it is a thought. I'm generally against the death penalty (except for high treason) but I would make these punks pay in spades in many other ways. I remember back in the 1980's, my boss at work came up with the idea of an "electric collar" where if a prisoner gets out of control, they get zapped by an officer or guard hitting a remote. I'd make these punks work hard to pay their debt to society cleaning roads, putting out forest fires, clear land mines and so on while wearing these collars. I also liked the idea in one movie where there was an explosive in the collars where if they got outside a certain distance, the collar would count down and warn the prisoner to get back or it will explode.

A radical New Testament approach would be to require former murderers to show atonement by saving lives, even at their own risk.

But again if the popular attitude were such as to support that, families probably would be already teaching young boys to do constructive things, rather than being aimless goons like this. And dealing with murder would be a much rarer task.

Since the liberals have disallowed the death penalty, they have as usual replaced it with nothing. It's not hard to imagine that for some fatherless criminals, the orderliness of life on the inside, however stark, is an improvement. Therefore loss of liberty may not be as big a deal to them as it would be to those who desire freedom from crime, who live in freedom by avoiding crime, and who created the system of imprisonment.

To make a punishment fit a serious crime, or to make an incarceration actually perform some act of deterrence, labor would be a useful device (and I don't mean 9-5 automated jobs in the prison laundry or kitchen). The ACLU would no doubt argue that hard labor violates human rights or is cruel and unusual. They are half right: requiring the criminal class to perform labor has indeed become unusual.