That’s actually exactly the problem we’re finding over here in the 21st century. I can barely move for smelly hippies waving their “FREE IAN BRADY” signs.
And he didn’t even make it successfully. OK, if the death penalty is eliminated, people could start protesting something else. So what?
This has got to be one of the most poorly placed posts ever. It literally comes right after I ended a post with
As I said, the OP is knee-jerkish, but I still don’t see how sentences of life without parole would cause prisons to become much, much nastier places than they now are. This already exists as a sentencing option in most states, and is the only meaning of a life sentence in several states. I don’t see evidence that prisons in these states are more brutish than others. According to here, though the figures are for 2004:
I may be making an assumption, but I think Aspidistra was talking about a big increase in the number of people in prison for life without the possibility of parole. Everybody knows some people are in prison for life without parole.
Sounds like the setup for Escape from New York, and we all know how that turned out. I always wondered what Ernest Borgnine did…
I know of four purposes of incarceration:
(1) Deterrence (Keep people from committing crimes because they don’t want to go to jail)
(2) Protection of society (If dangerous criminals are locked up, they can’t do further harm)
(3) Justice/punishment/revenge/whatever word you want to use (Our sense that criminals should be made to “pay” in some sense for the wrong that they have done)
(4) Rehabilitation (Prisoners come out of prison less likely to commit crimes than when they went in)
Of these, the rehabilitation is the one I’m most skeptical about actually happening, though I may be wrong.
The devil is in the details; facts matter.
Do you think that a teen-aged defendant with a low IQ who murders an abusive adult deserves the same sentence as an adult who tortures and kills a child or vulnerable adult? How about a guy who has sex with a drunken date versus someone who assaults a woman at gunpoint?
And not all of those life sentences for murder are life without parole. New York still has twenty-five to life sentences as a sentencing option for even first degree murder NYS Penal Law sentencing The prisons wouldn’t necessarily be any nastier than they are now- but it would be more expensive to keep them from getting nastier. Because the loss of “good time” is a fairly significant deterrent to misbehavior while in prison and it would have to be replaced with something - whether it be keeping inmates in their cells for 23 hours a day and allowing them 1 hour in a their own individual fenced yard, or increasing the staffing. There’s a limited range of punishments available in prison - loss of packages, phone calls,correspondence and/or visits , loss of good time/eligibility for early release, and some variety of “locked in a cell 23 hours a day” are about all I can think of. Life without parole sentences take that middle option away.
Is there any evidence that handing out life sentences has worked so far? The US has some of the harshest prison sentences and some of the highest violent crime rates. Sweden has far more lenient sentences and far less violent crime.
It isn’t cut and dried. You are confusing vengeance for social policy. Everyone feels vengeance, but it isn’t designed to make society safe. Making society safe requires a lot more complex ideas than that.
Someone posted an article about how the removal of lead from the environment was behind much of the decline in crime. Stuff like that has no moral impact good or bad, but it seems to work.
I’d also be interested in knowing / seeing a comparison of length of sentence and deterrence effect by length of crime.
I seem to remember that “deterrence effect” of different sentences is a combination of expectation of being caught, “benefit” of the crime and length of sentence - but that there was a severe drop-off after 5 years or so in terms of length of sentence.
You’d also need to take into account the thought process of a murderer / violent rapist etc - can they really be thought of as “rational” in the traditional sense? Whereby the difference between say a 10 year and a life sentence makes a difference - or is even thought about in the first place?
And then, of course, is life imprisonment for societies protection or for punishment? Or for both? This would make a difference -
If it’s for “society protection” is life imprisonment the cheapest and best way to go? If it’s for punishment - isn’t the biblical “eye for an eye” a better option?
Here in Singapore, you basically get two weeks jail for your second DUI - something that by most standards is harsh (and Singapore prisons are not a pleasant place), yet you still get a LOT of people that drink and drive. Why? Because the expectation of getting caught is very low. We also have a mandatory death sentence for murder - and the murder rate is relatively low, a good part of which I believe is because there’s no access to guns here.
That doesn’t seem harsh to me. Here you can get up to 6 months for one conviction, and it seems quite reasonable in my opinion. I’m not sure what the real sentence is likely to be for an “average” drink driver, but I’d expect the full 6 months for a second conviction. Hopefully someone else can enlighten me on that. But what do you mean by “most standards”? I’m not challenging you, just interested in why you say that.
Mandatory sentences are stupid in the first place. Life Sentences for anything short of multiple murders are also extremely questionable in my book.
Life Sentence for Rape? Be serious. Even if you could prove 100% without any doubt that the person committed the crime (false accusations and wrongful convictions being unacceptably high for this crime), this is not a crime worthy of a life sentence for a single offense.
I think there’s some evidence that longer sentences are one of the reasons violent crime has decreased over the last few decades, yes. I’ll see if I can find a good cite.
My thoughts on this:
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I doubt there’s many people in prison now for prostitution or a baggie of weed, and when you get into things like selling or transporting crack and heroin I don’t think those are victimless, since people get addicted to them, steal from innocent people to keep their habit up, etc.
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I’m not sure why just dispensing with locking people up forever and executing them for rape was not cruel and unusual for the first 200 years of our country but suddenly became so during the soft on crime era.
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The OP did specify first degree murder. To a great extent we’re already doing that, in a number of states their wouldn’t be any question about whether Jody Arias would leave prison in a box one way or another.
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Geriatric prisoners is a big issue, but someone who is that old is probably going to be the responsibility of the government anyway, whether through Medicaid or the prison system. Maybe we could have secure nursing homes for someone who’s so pathetically ill that they aren’t going to escape and commit more crimes and so the victims don’t see them ever released.
Of the several problems with your proposal, this one strikes me as the most significant. We don’t punish folks for crimes they haven’t committed and may never. We punish those crimes if and when they occur. What you’re proposing is what’s wrong with Guantanamo. It’s wrong there and it’s wrong here.
The “by most standards” was a sop to what I have read on this board, and also to what I have seen back home in New Zealand.
By what I read here, people that are on multiple drink drive convictions in some places in the US just suffer a small fine and that’s about it.
In New Zealand, I don’t really have a cite or a study or anything, but for a second offense I’d be expecting community service in the hundreds of hours, a significant fine and more.
Here in Singapore, a business acquaintance got two weeks jail for a second offense - from what I understand the two instances were of the order of more than 20 years apart, and he was marginally over the limit. So in comparison I found that harsh.
In the general sense - to my way of thinking, first time if you are just a bit over - heavy fine plus community service. Second offense (absent seriously mitigating factors) confiscation of car + possibility of jail if its particularly egregarious
When Americans want other thrid world countries to evolve into liberal democracies with modern notions of justice they site commonly held beliefs among the majority of liberal democracies. Yet we are in the minority on preserving the death penalty and think the rest of the modern world needs to mind it’s own god damn business.
I’d be interested to see that too, since violent crime has decreased over much of the developed world in the last couple decades, without on average becoming more draconian.
Maybe because the death penalty is a trivial issue compared to whether a country actually is a democracy or not?
In addition while I oppose the death penalty in most cases, the fact is too many death penalty opponents are moralistic whiners who go against people’s natural sense of justice by implying the state’s diposing of a murderer is morally equivalent to the murderer taking an innocent’s life rather than sensible nuts and bolts arguments regarding relative costs of executing a man versus imprisoning him for life (how many know that the latter is actually cheaper?) or the risk that an innocent man be executed?
I’d rather see them reformed than incarcerated permanently. Murder is way worse than rape, so they shouldn’t have equivalent sentences. Generally any sentence longer than 20 years is pointless. There also needs to be wiggle room both in terms of the type of murder, and in giving the DA the ability to seek a plea. And finally, a lot of crimes stem from societal inequities, if we focus on those rather than expending a lot of effort and money after the fact, a lot of the crimes will disappear.