this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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You're correct, but anyone from the US, whether they're on the furthest right or the furthest left, is going to have an incredibly hard time understanding why. Their country is deeply indoctrinated with this notion that anything less than the death penalty is basically a slap on the wrist, and even the progressive segments of their populace have mostly failed to ever meaningfully address or deconstruct this sentiment. Left/right disagreements over justice in the US tend to look more like disagreements over which things you should get put in prison for life for, rather than positing that such extensive prison terms being normal across the board might not be healthy for a society.
What this couple did is horrific, and it deserves a very serious penalty, and the problem then becomes that because the bar for "Very serious penalty" is set at "Spend most of your life in prison", arguing for anything less than that feels like siding with these monsters against their victims.
I'm an American though, and many of my friends agree with me on the topic of prison reform
American here as well. Prison reform is needed, it's modern slavery. But these people are Nazis and I do feel no remorse being intolerant of their actions in society. Rehabilitation or exile I do think are appropriate ways forward. It's not the people that aren't reasonable, it's our laws and two tiered justice system.
See, this is an excellent example of the point I just made.
Even when people say "I want prison reform" they inevitably always have some kind of carve out for "Except in the case of X."
Which means you don't actually have a problem with the current system. You just have a problem with who it gets applied to.
This isn't an example of that. My alternatives were rehabilitation or exile, which I suppose could be argued isn't reform as we've exiled people as punishment for like as long as we've been people, but I'm really having a hard time seeing how I said "except in the case of x" I said you should be mean to Nazis, not lock them up for life.