A call for sentencing reform
Los Angeles Times: What’s prison for, anyway? Is it to change people, to punish them, or simply to remove them from the streets? If the number of cells is finite — and it is — society had better figure out its reasons for selecting whom it locks up and how long it holds them.
Unfortunately, states and the federal government have done a poor job of defining just what they want from their prisons. That sort of philosophical fumbling was brought home again with a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union that found 3,200 people in nine states serving sentences of life without parole for nonviolent crimes. That’s prison until death for offenses as minor as shoplifting.
It would be naive to believe that every offender, even every nonviolent offender, can be rehabilitated. Society needs prisons to protect itself, to punish and to deter. But it is foolhardy to lock up felons for unreasonably long periods, clogging prisons, wasting taxpayer dollars and failing to establish a coherent connection between the sentence and what it is supposed to accomplish.