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, in some cases, as shoplifting.
Judges often have no choice but to hand down such excessive terms under mandates, much like California's three-strikes law, meant to ensure harsh punishment for repeat offenders. But if the point is to get the thief to stop stealing, a lifetime behind bars is an absurdly expensive — not to say outrageously harsh — way to get the job done. Only the most dangerous offenders, chiefly those who would perpetrate violence, should be locked away forever.
California voters came closer to just and workable repeat-offender laws a year ago when they modified the existing three-strikes law so that the longest terms — 25 years to life — would go only to those whose final "strike" was a serious or violent crime. But thousands of people remain "incapacitated" in prison across the nation for life for relatively minor offenses, in part because lawmakers desperate to deal with crime forgot about the criminal justice system's role beyond simple punishment.
