"Life Without Parole Is A Terrible Idea"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new commentary by Professor David Dow appearing in The Daily Beast. Here are excerpt:

If California dumps the death penalty this November, abolitionists will probably dance in the streets.  But they shouldn’t, because the state would be abandoning one terrible idea only to replace it with another.

The so-called Savings, Accountability, and Full Enforcement for California Act, or SAFE, would eliminate capital punishment across the board in favor of life without parole.... If it passes, the lives of 725 prisoners currently awaiting execution will be spared. Instead of dying on a gurney from lethal injection, they will die in prison of natural causes (or maybe violence).

The impetus behind SAFE is largely economic. California has spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since 1976, and executed 13 people.  And since well over half the costs of a death-penalty case occur before the appeals even begin, there is no way to lower those costs meaningfully, short of adopting a legal system modeled on that of Iran or the DR Congo.  So fiscal hawks in California, even law-and-order fiscal hawks, appear ready to write off the death-penalty experiment as a failure.

But cost isn’t the only factor.  Opponents of the death penalty have passionately embraced LWOP — as the alternative sentence is affectionately known — because it undeniably saves lives.  In 2005, Texas, which executes far more people than any other state, gave juries the option of imposing LWOP instead of execution.  The number of death sentences plummeted, from 30 to 40 a year down to the single digits today.... LWOP also appeals, of course, to voters who are worried about executing an innocent person....

[But] life without parole is as dehumanizing as death itself, and in some ways it is even worse.

On the plus side, LWOP saves lives, but that’s about it. In every other way it’s a nightmare: It gives up on everyone, regardless of whether they exhibit any capacity for growth and change; it robs people of hope; it exaggerates the risk to society of releasing convicted murderers; and it turns prisons into geriatric wards, with inmates rolling around in taxpayer-funded wheelchairs carrying oxygen canisters in their laps.

To the extent there is a coherent rationale underlying LWOP, it rests on two mistaken premises.  First, many people think we need to lock up murderers forever to keep society safe.  But it is a myth that murderers kill over and over again....

This brings us to the second premise, which is that sometimes we want to punish people simply for the sake of punishing them, to express society’s outrage at the commission of abhorrent acts.  There are indeed good reasons for a society to punish people who do bad things.  But is this really the message we want to send as a society?  That one horrible act will render you permanently unredeemable, no matter what you do or how you may change over the rest of your life?

It’s an undeniable fact that even people who do terrible things can change.  A kid who commits murder when he’s twenty can be a substantially different person when he’s fifty, much less sixty.  Maybe it feels good on some level to tell that twenty-year-old he will never see the light of day again.  But in the end, this narrow, angry, stubborn posture hurts us as a culture far more than it could ever hurt the kid....

Also, of course, prisoners who are eligible for parole are not guaranteed release. That decision is made by parole board members, who take into consideration what the inmate did as well as who he has become.  Certainly they make mistakes, but is that a reason for a blanket rule that everyone who murders should be prevented from even making a case for their release?   For every Willie Horton, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of paroled inmates who spend the rest of their lives respecting the law.

Most prisoners sentenced to life will never get out of prison anyway, because wary parole boards will be scared to release them (see, for example, Mr. Manson).  But LWOP’s core defect is that is prevents even reformed murderers from asking.  A society that embraces LWOP is a society that has thrown in the towel way too early.