Is it Time to Rethink Life-Without-Parole Sentencing?

Periodically, I receive letters from prisoners. One recently arrived from an obviously bright person who spotted a math error in one of my textbooks and who offered his life story, quoted here with permission:

Here in Michigan, our roads are crumbling while our prisons are overstuffed. That makes me wonder: Mindful both of the horrific nature of this teenager’s crime, but also of (which lag the development of the emotional limbic system), does it really make sense—is it in the public interest—to incarcerate this person for life?

Teens, we know, . With brains not yet fully equipped to contemplate long-term consequences, they are at risk for succumbing to the tobacco corporations, fast driving, unprotected sex and emotional outbursts.

That fact of life led the American Psychological Association in 2004 to join other health associations in filing a Supreme Court arguing against the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds. Teens are “less guilty by reason of adolescence,” argued psychologist Laurence Steinberg and law professor Elizabeth Scott. The Court agreed, and in 2012 the APA offered similar against sentencing juveniles, such as my letter-writer, to life.

A recent summarized that, additionally, reveal the short lifespan of most criminal violence. For murder, rape, robbery and assault, arrest rates peak around the age at which my letter-writer committed his crime, and then begin their long plummet, as shown by this figure created online for me by the :

As David Lykken noted in his 1995 book, “We could avoid two-thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28.” The frontal lobes mature. Testosterone declines. Guys mellow.

A 21-year sentence cap such as Norway has (even for mass murderer , with possible extensions if he is deemed still a risk) would release violent prisoners only after their criminal career has almost surely ended. A 40- or 50- or 60-year-old parolee is unlikely to rape, assault or murder someone. (Exceptions could be made for convicts who continue to exhibit aggressive behavior in prison, which indicates that they are still .)

The possibility of a mandatory life sentence is not an effective crime deterrent. When committing a crime of passion, people seldom pause to calculate the consequences (which explains why even capital punishment ). Any deterrence effect comes more from swift and sure arrest. What matters is not the length of a punishment but its

If violent criminal tendencies seldom extend to midlife, and if mandatory life sentences offer little added deterrent effect but considerable financial and social cost, then is it time to rethink life-without-parole sentencing? Will today’s prolonged mass incarceration seem to our grandchildren as merciless and foolish as yesteryear’s debtors’ prison?

Social psychologist Brett Pelham has an answer. In his new book manuscript, , he notes that “Today, the U.S. makes up less than 5% of the earth’s population but about 25% of the earth’s prison population. Arguably, the biggest part of this huge problem is not that we put way too many people in prison. It’s that we keep them there for a very, very long time.”

But there is good news: a bipartisan consensus is emerging that the costs of prolonged, mass incarceration to U.S. families and public finances is excessive (see and ). By giving judges more discretion in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders, the proposed Smarter Sentencing Act of 2015 aims “to focus limited Federal resources on the most serious offenders” and to reduce the prison population.