It depends. Federal parole was abolished for crimes committed after 1987. Sixteen states have also abolished parole. Others have restricted it so that it would not be available for violent offenders (of the type likely to receive a life sentence).
A federal defendant will be sentenced to a determinate term of months and would expect to serve 85% to 100% of it (depending on behavior). A federal sentence of life means life. I don’t really know how it works at the state level (but my understanding is that Virginia, for example, where I live, which abolished parole in 1995, results in some of the same consequences).
Yeah, there was that case some decades ago where a guy raped a 15-year old girl, tried to kill her so she couldn’t identify him (and thought he had), lopping her hands off with an ax so her body couldn’t be identified before throwing her over a cliff.
He knocked her unconscious with a sledgehammer, spent the whole night raping her, and tortured her by severing both her forearms with a hatchet. Singleton figured she was dead or near death and he threw her off of a 30-foot cliff on Interstate-5 near Del Puerto Canyon, leaving her naked and bleeding out. She mitigated the bleeding from her forearms by shoving them into mud, and the mud suppressed her bleeding while she managed to pull herself back up the cliff. She walked for three miles, naked, covered in blood, and armless, before finding and alerting a passing couple, who took her to a hospital.
He didn’t get the death penalty (which I agree with, actually) but I care not how much remorse he had displayed, he didn’t deserve to be released, ever, and as it turned out, he did not display any at all.
One journalist who interviewed him remarked, “What was most surprising to me, however, was not his sentence. It was that Larry Singleton had worked his crimes around in his mind so completely that they did not warrant punishment at all.”[11] Right before Singleton’s parole ended, Donald Stahl, the Stanislaus County prosecutor at Singleton’s trial, said, “I think, if anything, he’s worse now. He has not taken responsibility. He lives in a bizarre fantasy land and acquits himself each day. He doesn’t accept his guilt and won’t resolve never to do it again.”[12]
After serving eight years of a fourteen-year sentence he eventually moved to Florida where he murdered another woman.
Then there’s the case of Jeffrey Dahmer - someone who performs amateur brain surgery on people, then rapes them, then kills them, then maybe does a little more raping of the corpse, then eats said victims, and… well, you get the idea. Anyone who is that warped is not safe to be at large and the rest of society should be protected from him. For better or worse, the question of life in prison with or without parole is now moot in his case.
Back in the 1990’s I worked at a health clinic that had a contract with the Bureau of Prisons to help transition people back to freedom. I didn’t exactly meet the guy, mostly just watched two very large Federal Marshalls march him in chains in and out of the building, but The Scariest Person I’ve Ever Seen In Real Life was another one of those Do Not Release EVER people. HIPAA prevents me from going into details but suffice to say he was in the Larry Singleton category of bad.
But there are a lot of people who got a long or a life sentence who probably could be rehabbed if anyone actually gave a damn and because upstanding citizens. Or at least no worse than average.
I wonder which of these two approaches is better, and why: giving long sentences with the possibility of early release/parole, or giving short sentences with the possibility of indefeintely extending them?
I would guess that a short sentence, with the possibility of being extended, gives more incentive to behave well than a long/life sentence with the possibility of being shortened. The main reason being that there’s more certainty and hope with a short sentence than with a long one that may or may not be cut short (I’m having a hard time putting an explanation in words, but that’s my best one.)
It may be unfair to specifically pop in to discuss this, but: Dear God, NO!
First off, the variables in that equation are not known and not knowable. Perhaps Qadop can tell from long experience and personal interaction who is and is not a danger, but the algorithm is not. Yet it must be designed in such a way as to spit out an answer, and as computers must, it will arrive with false confidence and false precision. The judicial system has been experimenting with similar systems lately is I have not yet heard of a single instance that was not corrupt, racist, wildly inaccurate, or even merely bizarrely stupid, to date.
This is a human decision, right or wrong, and humans must take responsibility for making it.
Are you sure about that? I was just reading about the Mafia’s “Last Don”, Joe Massino. He was sentenced in Federal court to two consecutive life sentences in 2005 . After ratting out everybody he knew, he was released eight years later under court supervision (parole?) for the rest of his life.
I remember Dahmer’s trial (the older sister of one of my grade school friends was one of his defense attorneys), and I recall, from that time, discussion about the insanity defense having a very high hurdle in Wisconsin. My recollection (which may not be perfect, and IANAL) is that, at least in Wisconsin, the insanity defense requires that the defendant be unable to distinguish between right and wrong, or that their actions are criminal.
Dahmer clearly suffered from serious mental and emotional issues, but both the state’s expert witnesses, and third-party professionals brought in by the court to testify, argued that Dahmer knew that was he was doing was wrong, and that he went to considerable lengths to cover his crimes.
The legal definition of sanity and the medical one are quite different. Though I will add that, having spoken with both the prison psychiatrist and prison primary care MD who treated Dahmer, medically he was sane also. Just very very personality disordered. He knew the difference between right and wrong but didn’t care to adhere to the ‘right’ side of that line.
Federal law allows for the reduction of a sentence for “substantial assistance” to the government, either before or after sentencing. I’m not familiar with the Massino case, but it sounds like this was the provision used, although that would be an… unusual reduction (but maybe he had really good information).
But, in any event, that would not be “parole” as I understand the term – sentencing a defendant to an indeterminate sentence and entrusting decisions on any release before the top of that sentence to a parole board or other similar entity. That is, in the ordinary course, a federal inmate sentenced to “life” is not going to be able to petition anyone (other than the President/Pardon Attorney) for an early release.
Sorry, not interested. Quite frankly, I would be more interested in ways of implementing the death penatly while avoiding miscarriages of justice.
I think one part of the both the criminal justice system should be a punitive aspect, AKA one of revenge/retribution. IMHO, if someone commits murder with aforethought and there are no extenuating/mitigating circumstances (e.g. you murdered an abuser), the absolute minimum possible punishment should be life imprisonment with no chance for parole for 20 years (IIRC that’s the penalty for first degree murder in Wisconsin). On a moral level, I agree with the death penalty for very serious crimes (I don’t actively lobby for it due to the consideration of miscarriage of justice, but neither do I lobby for its abolition where it still exists). As for complete human monsters such as Anders Brevik, who killed 77 innocent people and wounded others, I find the notion of subjecting him to a humane incarceration where he can even get out of jail after 20-odd years obscene. I don’t care how well he might one day be rehabilitated. He should be made to pay for his crime. If I could, I would subject him to a punishment that would be exponentially more hellish that the absolute worst thing that happened in Auschwitz.
I don’t consider myself a humanist; on the contrary, I pride myself on considering myself divorced from humanism. I am fully capable of hating my neighbor and I am proud of the fact that I haven’t fetishized human life to the point where I would believe it wrong to hate even the most evil monsters in society. I don’t consider that all human life has intrinsic value. IMHO your human value partly depends on whether by your willful actions you contribute happiness or misery to others. Now, I’m not someone who believes in draconian punishments for petty crimes, or even for relatively serious ones. However, I do believe that the punishment should fit the crime, and that if you infringe on others’ rights, you forefit the right to have your own respected. I want a criminal justice system which values making the victim feel better (within reason, of course) over any considerations for the perpetrator’s rights and interests.
I think this proposal is at cross purposes to the anti death penalty argument.
The most powerful argument for getting rid of the death penalty is that we don’t need to kill someone as we can protect society simply by locking them away for life. If you take that away, then the argument for death becomes stronger.
It might be instructive to look at the Polk County, Florida roster of inmates on death row and to consider the implications of commuting those death sentences to finite terms well short of life in prison.
For instance, this guy:
“Leon Davis, 42, is facing four death sentences for two unrelated crimes. He was convicted of gunning down two convenience store clerks - Prakashkumar Patel, 33, and Dashrath Patel, 52 - as they changed the marquee at a BP gas station on County Road 557, just south of Interstate 4. A week later, he attempted to rob the Headley Nationwide Insurance office in Lake Wales, and when the clerks had little more than $150, he strapped them to a chair, doused them in gasoline and set them on fire. After he left, Yvonne Bustamante, 27, and a pregnant Juanita Luciano, 23, freed themselves and ran outside for help, their clothes still burning. They died within days of the attack, as did Luciano’s newborn son, who was delivered prematurely the night of the attack.”
One possibility is transporting such people to a progressive nation like Germany or Norway, which frown on life sentences, and let them show us how it’s done.
My ideal is a prison system, which while offering opportunities for rehabilitation to those who are interested, focuses on separating violent, sociopathic offenders from society for as long as possible, up to the remainder of their lives, while providing humane and even mildly pleasant surroundings so these people will be reasonably content behind bars.
Traditionally it is said that there are four goals to imprison someone: retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation. Society has bounced all over the place over the years as to which of these is most important, and this difference of opinion has, IMHO, created a prison system which fails to work as we have the worst of all worlds with a mixed model like that.
There is something to be said that if you murder someone, you should forfeit your freedom for the rest of your life no matter your ability to be rehabilitated. You took someone’s life, so why should you get to live yours in freedom at a future date? For lesser crimes, say an armed robbery where you get a term of years and will get out some day, it is a good idea to rehabilitate the person. But how do you rehabilitate them by locking them up and having them spend all of their time around convicted felons so they can learn how to commit a better armed robbery next time?
Any changes to the current system are met with protest from one side that we are spending too much money “coddling” criminals and a change in the other direction will be met with protest from the other side that we are not doing enough to reintegrate them into society. As crazy as it sounds, prisons are, at the same time, both too harsh and too lenient. It is a fundamentally broken system, but I don’t have an idea for a better one.
I think many people are locked up for 25 to life b/c we’re angry at them, but there are some people who are either just too dangerous to be released or, as @pkbites said, have done something so outrageous that they’ve lost their membership to living in civilized society forever. That doesn’t mean they should be killed or subjected to torture, but a select few should remain unfree forever.
I am, in the hypothetical, willing to listen to an end to life sentences, but it’s near the end of a long, long list of prison reforms. I think most of us agree that as it currently stands, US imprisonment has a strong emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation, which probably contributes to our repeat offenders. Not to mention that our society has a strong stench of ‘once a felon, always a felon’ in hiring practices and social acceptence.
We would need to make prisons into a place where people can be rehabilitated, and also given the tools, incentive, and support to succeed in post-prison life.
Once those (monumental) tasks are accomplished, along with dealing with our racial profiling in arrests and convictions that feed into the above problems, then we can and should reconsider out sentencing guidelines, which, oh big surprise, suffer from the same issues, as well as perhaps considering options where the consequences of ‘white collar’ crimes are taken into account. A white collar criminal can wipe out the assets of thousands (or more), plunging them into financial duress or worse, but is sentenced more lightly than many cases of stealing $150 from a gas station.
And while we can consider taking life imprisonment off the table, that doesn’t mean we have to restore full freedom - we have the tech to be nuanced. We could consider a transition to graduated stages of parole, with additional monitoring and support as I have been stressing. We already live in a society where the bet is someone can/will record you at all times, might as well make it work for us.
These two items. Add that to the fact that there are companies and people who are profiting from prisons, so it is in their best interest to keep people, whether they are a threat to societ or not, in prison.
Full disclosure, I also believe that once someone has served their time, they should be able to vote and be treated as any body else.
And a case like Alan Russel’s tells us that there’s room for improvement in how the U.S. punishes criminal behavior.