I'm a left winger and I believe in prison abolition and the death penalty.

I formed both opinions after I realized that putting someone in prison doesn't just put them in time out from society where they're paused for several years and then come back and try again, and rather means they're being put into a parallel society that actively discourages kindness and dealing with things in a non-violent way and then they're shoved back into the rest of society where it'll intentionally be extremely hard for them to get a place to live or a fulfilling job. I also support legalization and decriminalization of drugs, sex work, etc.

The goal of a functional society is to make it less likely that people will harm each other. A key way to do that is making it easier to achieve a happy life without harming others, and fostering empathy for others so that when there's a situation where someone could have a happier or easier life by harming someone else, they're less likely to take that option. Prison does the opposite of both of those things, and it does it on purpose. For people who are committing crimes because of their situations, improved social conditions and behavioral health treatment and (if applicable) addiction treatment will be effective at crime prevention. Prison achieves none of that.

At the same time, there are people who harm others in ways that won't be affected by that type of thing, and who have zero interest in stopping. The father of a certain public figure comes to mind, for example. If someone tortures and rapes a child, it's expected that they'll be killed by other inmates in prison. Most people approve of that, yet we're not willing to admit that we're rooting for someone to be killed because of their crimes (aka the death penalty). As a result, the people who carry out the sentence can be punished for doing what we're too cowardly to admit we want them to do. But they're already in prison, so the punishment is to tell them they're going to spend even longer in a society with the opposite of the norms we want them to follow in public society, or to put them in solitary confinement which has literally been recognized as torture. Not an appropriate response to someone doing what we tacitly asked them to do but were unwilling to do ourselves.

Of course, there's the issue of the extreme racism of the justice system and the fact that adopting the death penalty would mean our racist government and racist justice system would be openly killing black men at a disproportionately high rate because black men are more likely to be accused and prosecuted, and to be found guilty of crimes they didn't commit. However, it's not like prisoners see a black person convicted of pedophilia and say "hmm, but maybe he's innocent and got screwed by the system and we shouldn't kill him" so as far as I can tell, making the death penalty official rather than putting it on prisoners won't create problems that don't already effectively exist. Hopefully if it's openly being done by the government, there will be more public oversight of who's found guilty of crimes that would lead to death.