We already got a few million winners, ever been to Atlanta?

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"In Honor There Is Hope"

Canada born, Georgia raised.

Well, there is a difference between someone of "good heart" who does something horrible vs a truly evil person. Two men may each kill someone, but the man who rapes and kills a child is far worse than the drug induced man who kills a dealer or a store teller. Though I have never met with anyone who received a life sentence, I have met people who have done long stints in prison. Some of them have actually turned their lives around, others have gone right back in.

My main two concerns against doing what many purpose (castration, mass genocide, torture, medical experimentation etc) are based on principle and possible innocence.

My father would always say "we should just go into the prisons one day and just open up with machine gun fire". When I asked him about killing some potential innocent people he responded with "as long as 50% of the people are guilty, than I have no problem killing the other 50% innocent". To me that is unacceptable. If you want to take someone who is just flat out guilty, the kind of smug ******* who sits back and says "Yeah, I killed him/her, what of it?" Go ahead, take 'em out. Not through tortuous methods, hanging works. What if we castrate someone who is truly innocent? Like that football player who recorded his ex girlfriend admitting she lied about being raped? (if you don't remember that I will post a link). While you can not undo time per se, you definitely can not undo execution or castration.

But what of the ones we know raped, molested, murdered people? Why not castrate them? Because we are better than them. The idea of retribution is enticing and I do believe that prisoners have it too easy in the United States. However, we do have to draw the line somewhere. A former police chief once told me "If we are willing to do anything in the name of justice, we are no better than the evil we are trying to defeat". We must maintain our higher integrity and ideals to separate ourselves from the truly atrocious in our society.

Let me ask you this question. If a woman is convicted of murder, lets take a more extreme example and say of a child. If a woman murders a child, should we allow her to be raped? Perhaps more than once? Torture, castration, rape, none of these should be used as a form of punishment or to send a message. We are better than these people, and our actions must be reflected as such.

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"In Honor There Is Hope"

Canada born, Georgia raised.

My father has worked in a prison for 25 years. He does not feel the way you do.

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You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Gypsy Soul Memories
Scuba Diver Life
Success Freaks

First, bear in mind that my suggestion wasn't really serious.

And you make good points.

To answer your question, I am not an advocate of inflicting suffering as an atonement, we call that "revenge."

To be honest, I don't want someone who is ever going to be released to be permanently damaged by their incarceration.

But I also think that incarceration is a poor form of punishment. The main reason for this being that most career criminals I've encountered seem to feel that they have no freedom anyway, and were forced into committing crimes by circumstance. They already exist in an abstract prison, putting them in an actual one doesn't seem to me to be effective.

Suffering, in my opinion should be inflicted for two reasons. First to alter the behavior of the person so treated. The second should be to deter those who might otherwise consider similar crimes.

In reality then, the prisoners that I'd support being made to suffer the least would be those sentenced to life without parole who otherwise behave in prison circumspectly. (I'd also severely limit most of their contact with the outside world in order to contain their contagion.)

A somewhat more serious take on the "neutering" issue though, might be that it would make incarcerated males more docile and tractable, and in the end lessen their suffering. Obviously, this isn't going to happen, but the idea is not completely without merit in extreme cases.

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“Quod scripsi, scripsi"

"Sometimes, the source of the beautiful dawning light that drives back the darkness, is your house burning"

We have laws against cruel and unusual punishment. I believe disfigurement comes under that.
Texas has been doing these sex changes for years. It is really a matter of safety for the prison. If a person considers himself another gender especially if he has already started hormone shots and counseling, where do you put him? He's going to cause havoc in either a male or a women's inmate facility.

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The Supreme Court already saw a case on this issue and declared that punitive sterilization was a violation of our constitution.
Skinner v. Oklahoma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value."
Albert Einstein

Ah! But not the conjunction. Punishment may be cruel, so long as it is not also unusual.

For the record, anyone who thinks that they are one gender, when they are another, barring rare physical abnormalities, should be beaten soundly with a high school biology book until they cone to their senses.

If you're a man who thinks that you're a swan, no amount of cutting is going to make you a waterfowl. The same if you think you're a woman. You'll just be a mutilated man.

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“Quod scripsi, scripsi"

"Sometimes, the source of the beautiful dawning light that drives back the darkness, is your house burning"

What about the safety issues I mentioned? Guards and other inmates will be in danger with an "unfinished" person who doesn't fit either facility. Women are going to be scared or disgusted at having someone with a penis in their midsts especially given the low mentality of most inmates and the myths surrounding this type of surgery. Males are going to beat the living sh*t out of him and/or rape this individual who has had hormone shots and has tits but still hasn't finished the operation.
In both thee scenarios guards are put in more danger than what they already are. This is a bazaar situation. One way to solve the security problem (and that is how I view it) is to follow through with the surgery and place her in a female facility or him in a male prison.
Not everything is black and white. If you work in a secured facility you may not like a certain person but you still have to keep order with the rest of them. Any violence at a prison can spark a riot.

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Chile?

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The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow.
Ayn Rand

So if Socialism is so great...why does it have to be mandated and forced on people?

Does not one of our Bill of Right contain some thing about unusable/harsh punishments?
Yet with gangs and their membership on the rise something worst than plain jail/prison terms might be what is needed.

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"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation... One is by sword... The other is by debt."

John Adams 1826