"The case for capping all prison sentences at 20 years"

The title of this post is the title of this very lengthy new piece by German Lopez at Vox.  I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts from the first part of the article:

America puts more people in jail and prison than any other country in the world.  Although the country has managed to slightly reduce its prison population in recent years, mass incarceration remains a fact of the US criminal justice system.

It’s time for a radical idea that could really begin to reverse mass incarceration: capping all prison sentences at no more than 20 years.  It may sound like an extreme, even dangerous, proposal, but there’s good reason to believe it would help reduce the prison population without making America any less safe....

Looking at the length of our prison sentences is one approach to reverse mass incarceration.  Empirical research has consistently found that locking up people for very long periods of time does little to nothing to combat crime, and may actually lead to more crime as people spend more time in prison — missing big life opportunities for legitimate careers, and being incarcerated with others who have ties to the criminal world.

There’s also good reason to believe that 20 years is a good cutoff for a maximum.  Studies have found that people almost always age out of crime, particularly by their late 30s and 40s.  If a person is locked up for a robbery or murder at 21, there’s a very good chance that he won’t commit that same crime when he gets out at 41.

Other countries show this can work. European nations tend to have shorter prison sentences than the US, and certainly fewer people in prison, along with roughly equal or lower violent crime rates.  Norway in particular caps the great majority of prison sentences at 21 years — and its violent crime and reoffending rates are lower than the US’s.  (The cap does have some exceptions, as I’ll explain later.)

A cap on prison sentences wouldn’t on its own end mass incarceration.  But at least tens of thousands of people in prison would benefit now — if the change were applied retroactively — and untold numbers more would benefit in the future if it were adopted by states and the federal government.

I’m not naive; I know there’s a very, very low chance that this policy will actually be enacted. And I know there are some difficult questions we need to confront if such a policy were ever put in place.  But I think pushing for something like this is a good idea anyway.  It forces a conversation about what prisons are for: Are they for keeping the public safe? Rehabilitating inmates?  Purely for revenge?  If our answer as a society is the first two, but not the latter, then a cap is something we should consider.

By beginning these kinds of conversations, we can try to get at the root cultural and social forces that enabled and encouraged mass incarceration to begin with.  Only by doing that can we start to really unravel a criminal justice system that’s turned into one of the world’s most punitive.