Judicial, Medical, and Penitentiary Aspects of an Incompressible Punishment - A Possible Substitute for the Death Penalty

• NCJ Number: 73443
• Journal: Revue penitentiaire et de droit penal Volume: 104 Issue: 1 Dated: (January-March 1980) Pages: 7-24
• Author(s): Levasseur; Leteneur; Hivert
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 17 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: French
• Country: France
• Note: Text reproduces the proceedings of a special section of the General Society of Corrections and Criminal Legislation held December 17, 1979.

Annotation

At the December 17, 1979 session of the French Commission on Corrections and Criminal Law a law scholar, a corrections official, and a forensic psychologist debated a proposed substitute for the death penalty.

Abstract

Replacing the death penalty with a prison sentence, 25 years of which would not be subject to review or reduction under any circumstances, has been called tantamount to replacing a swift death with a lingering one. However, no one could seriously question the necessity of sentencing offenders whose crimes are heinous enough to be legally punishable by death to be incarcerated under maximum security conditions, at least until their dangerousness is no longer an issue. Alternatives to imprisonment, such as transportation to a penal colony in some remote Arctic or tropical island, or the revival of corporal punishment according to the Islamic model (the latter incredibly advocated in some fashionably extremist circles) would be impractical, or inhumane, or both. However, an immutable 25 year prison sentence raises serious juridical, penological, and medical questions. Depriving a convicted offender of all hope that good behavior may reduce his sentence automatically defeats the rehabilitation and social reintegration objectives prescribed by the correctional reforms of the last decade. Hopelessness and despair, leading to irrational outbursts of violence against prison guards and fellow inmates, will compound security problems, and further endanger the lives and warp the attitudes of correctional personnel expected to implement inmate treatment and rehabilitation programs. Irreversible prisonization, together with the psychological, intellectual, and physical deterioration of inmates serving immutable sentences will be the inescapable result. On the other hand, legislators must still solve the dillemma of protecting society against incorrigible, violent criminals, while trying to accommodate the demands, understandable but often utopian, of social reformers and humanitarians. Footnotes contain biliographic references.