Even if an inmate's sentence is not oppressively long, their treatment while incarcerated can still constitute subhuman treatment. Prisons are not medical facilities, but they regularly are forced to deal with mental health problems and care for elderly and terminally ill inmates. Food, if it's even edible, usually lacks enough nutrition for inmates' health to not deteriorate. Plus, with a lack of opportunities to see family, read, or gain skill sets, inmates are placed in buildings which lack any resemblance of the civilized world.
“Serving a prison sentence is difficult in and of itself. The deplorable living conditions, the separation from loved ones, the brutality—you know about all of this. But do you know what it’s like to serve your time at a prison where executions are occurring? That was my reality when I was incarcerated at the Huntsville Unit, where the state of Texas housed the busiest death chamber in the country.“
The Marshall Project
April 25, 2019
Read More“Conservatives have their own standards, including this one: The state — government — already is altogether too full of itself, and investing it with the power to inflict death on anyone exacerbates its sense of majesty and delusions of adequacy.“
National Review
September 30, 2018
Read More"But human beings just insist on being social creatures, and no matter how much you indoctrinate or denigrate them, they remain as much. Officers are not emotionless robots any more than death-row prisoners are reducible to the crimes for which we have been convicted and sentenced."
The Marshall Project
August 30, 2018
Read More"These findings, along with others, help support the view that aspects of contemporary psychology rest on a deep, evolved rationality. They also have more immediate, practical implications: The ability of scientific psychology to better understand the peripheral factors that shape beliefs about the death penalty may be, for some, the difference between life and death."
Arizona State University
August 24, 2018
Read More"Yet the restarting of the death machinery in Nashville runs against a well-documented trend both in Tennessee and the rest of the country. Executions are declining year after year — and new death sentences have become vanishingly rare."
The Intercept
August 15, 2018
Read More"Ohio Gov. John Kasich has finished dealing with executions for the remainder of his time in office following a modern-era record of death penalty commutations."
Cincinnati Enquirer
July 30, 2018
Read More"Department officials have said all four drugs were purchased in the United States, but declined to say how the drugs were obtained or who provided them. They're currently fighting lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska and Nebraska media outlets that could force them to release documents identifying the supplier. Nebraska's last execution was in 1997, using the electric chair, but the state Supreme Court later declared the chair unconstitutional."
New York Times
July 27, 2018
Read More"In recent years, death row inmates were just as likely to die awaiting execution as they were to be executed. Last year, 24 death row inmates across the country died in prison awaiting execution, mostly due to natural causes, while 23 inmates were executed."
Reuters
June 18, 2018
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