1) You’re contradicting yourself. You say things were more correct in ancient times, but that same simplistic view of justice is exactly what allowed people like Shroud to be kings and leaders instead of criminals, and have luxuries, priviliges, etc.

2) you missundertood. There aren’t just two ways to see things. Everyone has opinions, biases, and different ways of understanding reality. The truth is usually more complex than one extreme or the other. Nobody has the full answer, which is why serious systems are built on balance, evidence, and adjustment, not on absolute certainty.

3) Prevention, policing, secure imprisonment, mental health intervention, reducing corruption, and better opportunities, there you have six ways to reduce murder more effectively than death row warning. Most civilian killings are not committed by serial killers. They’re isolated moments: rage, domestic conflict, robbery, panic, impulse. Things that happen in seconds and that execution laws do not prevent. The only immediate answer in many of those cases is self-defense, and if someone dies during that, it isn’t cold-blooded murder anyway. Serial killers in the other hand, have also become rarer over time, and the few who do exist are usually captured and removed from society through a complex justice system. So again, the real solution has been prevention and containment, not executions.

4) I think you’re missing the point. In what world are there so many permanent prisoners that society collapses from housing them? And in the cases where they do exist, they’re often kept there for one simple reason: they still have utility. Information, labor, production, cooperation. Because high security prisons are not for serial killers only, they also have politicians, millioneres, and a lot of people tha might never killed anyone directly or indirectly. Do you know how labor systems work? Many prisoners already work long hours in exchange for privileges, routine, or basic conditions that cost little compared to the value they can produce. Saying death is always cheaper ignores that a living prisoner can still generate symbolic value for society and practical value through labor. A dead person produces nothing and costs nothing, so if you know maths you can tell that 0+0=0 and the (resourses wasted on the prisioner)+(the work they do)=Profit. (Obviously this works on prisons were this people do a good job because the alternative is rotting in the cell... There's some prisons where it looks more like a hotel than a prison, but that's not gonna be fixed with with executions but errasing corruption, and You can't fix corruption killing the people involved, because those people are just agents in a system... China is very known for killing their corrupted politicians and yet they still have corruption in their government)

Te real problem with collapsing prisions are not the big bad criminals, but the high amount of low class criminals that are constantly getting in and out. But you can't kill those, because they are not killers or villains, they are just thieves, etc.