Candidly, incidents like this make me struggle – mightily – between my ex-defense lawyer impulse that prisons shouldn't be this way, and my ex-Republican impulse that some people need killing

You could square that circle by opposing prisons but supporting the death penalty. We wouldn't hold people behind bars while awaiting the outcome of their trial, but if a conviction is secured, the perp is knifed in a ditch by two goons, Kafka-style.

My thoughts are usually: “this shouldn’t happen to anyone, but I only have so many ABPs and am going to save them for someone else.”

For myself, I think it's entirely possible that some people need killing. I just don't trust the state to be the determiner of who they are. (Or anybody else, for that matter, but especially the state.)

I sympathize, but am more comfortable on a thought experiment level with extra-legal karmic consequences when they happen outside of prison. Like, I dunno, Chauvin’s not in jail, runs into someone he mistreated as a cop in a bar, gets beaten to death, perp gets away?

I’m neither jubilant nor devastated that Chauvin got stabbed, but I am angry that his stabbing occurred in the context of a state-run extrajudicial-stabbing-facilitation system.