Against Life Imprisonment without Parole

Life imprisonment exists in 183 countries; life with parole exists in 144 countries, where there is some provision for release; and, 65 countries impose life without parole sentences. Recent studies have shown that countries that abolish the death penalty replace it with life imprisonment without parole and, widen the array of offenses which carry this maximum sentence. It is clear that bad behavior has to be punished, but life imprisonment without parole is not the ideal solution for achieving the common good; because it is inhuman and closes any possibility of reform or rehabilitation.

There are four main factors that play a role in the making process of a judicial sentence: retribution (punishing bad behavior); rehabilitation (correcting problematic behavior); safety (keeping the community safe and out of threats); and deterrence (making sure the criminal and also others, are scared of breaking the law). According to statistics, some people believe that a long prison sentence achieves all these four conditions. One of them was Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York, that said in 1998: “There is an effective alternative to burning the life out of human beings in the name of public safety. That alternative is just as permanent, at least as great a deterrent and–for those who are so inclined–far less expensive than the exhaustive legal appeals required in capital cases. That alternative is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.” This thinking trend, is one of the reasons for the considerably increase of life penalty during the past years. In 2014, there were roughly 479,000 persons serving formal life sentences around the world, compared to 261,000 in the year 2000, representing a rise of nearly 84 per cent in 14 years.

Throughout the years, there have been thousands of studies on this controversial topic. One of the most recent ones, is a global survey on prisoner serving life terms, conducted by Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton. Within their recently published book: Life Imprisonment: A Global Human Rights Analysis, they make an argument for a human rights-based reappraisal of this punishment, based on data collection and legal analysis. Most prisoners have described this experience such as ‘a tunnel without light at the end’ and ‘a slow, torturous death”.  Many prisoners report a sense of shock and powerlessness during the initial stages of imprisonment. After these stages, they lose hope and they would rather die than keep living, because they have absolutely nothing to fight for. “I am alive, and I really don’t want to be. I have nothing to live for. I’m serving life without the possibility of parole, and that might as well be a death sentence. I will never leave this place, and the thought of that forces any sliver of hope out of me.” (Zyl Smit, Appleton, 186). Apart from the state of hopelessness, they experience social isolation and loss of contact with the outside world, and make no contribution to society.  Not only this has a bad effect on the prisoners, but also on their families that have to keep living with this feeling of anguish and impotence.

Article 10(3) of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states that “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation…” If prisoners don´t have the possibility of rehabilitation, this punishment is never beneficial nor effective for society; therefore, a new method of fixing bad behavior should be designed with the ultimate purpose of making the world a better place. I strongly believe that every prisoner should have the opportunity to be rehabilitated back into society, even those convicted of the most serious offenses.