One traditional punishment that I don’t see being explicitly discussed much is exile.
I.e., we don’t want you here. You have a month to find somewhere else to go, then we shoot you on sight.
It’s got quite a few good points for it:
The convict is responsible for his maintenance, so it’s him/her that must put a price on his/her life;
Even if we pay for his/her air fare it’s cheaper than permanent incarceration;
It’s not permanent (if the convict picks exile), so it can be reversed if new evidence comes up in a decade;
With modern communications the family can interact the convict without leaving the country, or they can choose to leave at the same time if they wish;
If no other country (or abandoned island) can be found to admit the exiled, that’s a pretty good justification for not accepting the cost of their upkeep;
If it so happens that Norway takes them in and rehabilitates them, so much the better; if it happens enough we might copy the experiment, or at least put in place a procedure to “parole” rehabilitated exiles;
Noncompliance is handled quite differently from things like illegal immigration and escape from prison: Next time you’re found (and we can confirm identity pretty well these days if we have the person before and after) you get executed within a couple of days, without the years of appeals and waiting in death row, and a much lesser chance to escape;
It’s pretty clear that people prefer it to prison, death row, and even persecution, given how many self-exile (e.g., run to Mexico) and claim political asylum; wouldn’t it be much simpler to just let someone go wherever someone’ll take them (remember, they get shot if they try to get back) than chase them all across the country just to drag them back, put them in prison, and pay for their upkeep for decades?
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.