You're the warden of a maximum security prison, and there's a national disaster that kills unknown millions of people and completely isolates your prison from civilization. Most of your guards flee to find their families, and you're left in a tough spot. You can't maintain the prison and its population by yourself, and if you leave then all the prisoners will die from thirst and starvation in short order. If you start releasing prisoners, the "safe" ones you let out will probably force you to release their friends as well. You yourself may not be in any immediate danger from the prisoners you release to fend for themselves, but you're pretty sure that some among the population will quickly return to preying on the weak and innocent, particularly in a society that's been disrupted by calamity. What do you do?
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Well, as a member of the Stock Exchange, I would suck their brains out with a straw, sell the widows, and go into South African zinc. (I'd ask Mrs. C for her opinion, but she's an accountant, and consequently too boring to be of interest.)
But seriously, Michael, what you've described is a "lifeboat ethics" situation. Somebody's going to get it in the shorts no matter what I, the warden, do. If the prison has a Death Row, and if it's within my power, I execute everyone on it at once, as painlessly as possible. Those inmates have already demonstrated a willingness to kill innocent others to get what they want; ergo, they're too dangerous to be paroled.
Everyone else gets freed. My rationale would be that society will need as many people working to restore it as it can get -- and it will need the toughest and strongest of them the most.
Yes, there would be predation. But my estimate is that the demands of sheer survival would make the results of that predation more acceptable than simply condemning all those prisoners to the most excruciating possible death.
Shoot all the prisioners, then hunt down the other guards and shoot them for deserting. No new society needs to have deserters.
Then, of course, shoot yourself because you will have become a mass-murderer. It's the just thing to do.