NCJ Number
219865
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 47 Issue: 4 Dated: July 2007 Pages: 597-615
Date Published
July 2007
Length
19 pages
Annotation
This paper critically assesses the main arguments for life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) as a punishment to replace the death penalty and then argues against life-long imprisonment as the ultimate sanction.
Abstract
A brief overview of LWOP focuses on related statues in the United States and related trends in the U.S. incarceration rate. A critical evaluation of the rationale for LWOP focuses on public protection, retribution, and deterrence as its foremost benefits. It concludes that these rationales are undermined by lack of empirical support. It then argues that any benefits for public safety that may be linked to LWOP are trumped by its lack of regard for human rights and human dignity. Van Zyl Smit argues that there are two aspects of LWOP that make it particularly destructive to human dignity, i.e., its indeterminacy and differences in the regimes to which life-sentence prisoners are subjected. Further, in a landmark decision in 1977, the German Federal Constitutional Court recognized that LWOP invariably involves the loss of personal dignity and the related denial of the right to rehabilitation. The court reasoned that the loss of all hope of ever being released inevitably accompanies LWOP and inherently undermines human dignity. Most legal systems have responded to this concern by setting a fixed period of imprisonment for retribution and deterrence, after which the prisoner must be considered for release. By contrast, such discussion has been absent in the United States since the mid-1970s, when this argument failed to persuade a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court to abolish the death penalty. This paper argues that LWOP faces many, if not all, of the objections to the death sentence and is therefore unacceptable in civilized society. 67 references