So what you’re saying is if there were a class of serious crimes that people with otherwise clean records were tempted to commit, they could do so with minimal repercussions.
For instance: you’re sixty years old, you and your wife are fairly well off but you’re kinda tired of her, but you’ll be a lot less well off if you have to split your pile with her in a divorce proceeding. So you incite an argument with her one night when you’re carving the steaks, stab her through the heart, show a lot of upset and remorse from the moment the police arrive, and after five years in a minimum-security prison, you’re rich and single.
That’s the problem with basing sentences primarily on the likelihood that you’ll do other crimes in the future - it can be gamed. And even if it isn’t gamed that often, I really, really don’t like the ways our system of justice can already be gamed, and I don’t want to add to them. The idea that you might get a semi-freebie in the way of crime if you’ve kept your nose clean for decades is just wrong, AFAIAC.
I’m not sure there is such a class of crimes. I also think that most people would be sufficiently terrified of five years (minimum!) in prison and the social stigma that followed it that they would still be deterred. Also, the killer in your example would still be financial liable in civil suits, not to mention his defense fees, so he’d hardly be rich when he got out.
There’s a few problems with this idea. How do you decide when a person is no longer a “danger to society”? If a guy was arrested for stealing a car, do you keep them in prison until you’re convinced he isn’t ever going to steal a car again? You can probably see the problem there - you’ll have the guy in prison the rest of his life.
On the opposite side, look at the guy who murdered his wife and his four children for the insurance. There’s no point in putting him in prison at all. He’s not going to ever murder his family again - they’re all dead and the insurance company wouldn’t sell him a new policy either.
As you can see, the problem is that the people who are most likely to be repeat offenders are those who commit relatively minor crimes. Really serious crimes are often a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Charles Manson is 74 years old. Would anyone like to see him paroled?
I understand the OP’s point to some degree, but I think something is lost from the deterrent factor of life sentences if they really only mean until retirement age.
At he age of 51, Lawrence Singleton kidnapped, raped, and mutilated 15-year-old Mary Vincent, and left her to die in a rural ditch in California. She lived, and testified, and Singleton was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was paroled after 8 years, and released from parole in 1988. In 1997, at the age of 70, nine days of being released from a hospital following a suicide attempt, he stabbed a prostitute to death in Florida and was sentenced to the electric chair. He died of cancer in 2001.
At what point would this geriatric felon have become incapable of re-offending? Had his victim lived, he might have gotten paroled again, and we’d have had a chance to find out.