A miscarriage of justice is always a terrible injustice is irreparable ... Being quiet at home, death seems more enviable to me than prison, but facing the guillotine, you and I would surely change your mind.
It is not simply staying in a cosy home, but staying in a prison with other inmates. Some prisoners wish to be sentenced to death.
Regarding radicalization, recidivism and violence, it is a problem linked to the lack of resources and training in prisons. And to a system that aims to be punitive rather than "restorative".
Is it? And admitting it is, wouldn't the ressources needed to such restorative prisons be exponentially growing with the size of a country?
In fact I think you have to choose the world in which you want to live. By executing criminals, they cost you less than trying to help them.
Death can be a form of help as well, both for a criminal and for a society. The benefit of a reintegration, however, is near zero for a society whereas it might eventually be for the inmate depending on its goals only.
We may think that a person who commits a crime is bad, has no place in society and that he should be eliminated since honest citizens do not have to pay for his faults.
Or we can think that a person who commits crimes, has also done it for external reasons, that he can be help to be able to correct his mistakes by becoming a "good" person.
That's reductive. You don't have to think that people are bad to get rid of them, neither to think others are honest to "preserve" them. An individual could be the nicest man on the Earth and wish for peace only, but if he does bring troubles to a society, then one could argue that all the man's wishes are nefast and that he should be punished for the simple reason than the actions are harming a current form of social peace.
Someone could also bring troubles to a society simply because he doesn't like the society or its members, eventually because he belongs to another society, or has values that are in contradiction with the society he lives in. In this case, there is no mistakes and no good person to become since that person is following his own agenda.
1) What is criminal? The notion of what is criminal or not can change depending on the place or time, some things that may seem trivial to us may have been considered criminal.
If it changes, then a core remains : Troubles to an established society is often considered to be offending at very least.
2) The death penalty is a dangerous tool because it facilitates the elimination of political opponents by those in power.
I think it's time for us to get rid of this old idea. It might have been true in the past, but we live in the 21th century, which happens to be a modern world. The war on information is much more powerful than simply killing a dude you disagree with and, as a French, you should see it everyday.