The US practice of locking people up for life is pretty shocking to many people in Europe. In the UK, the number of people who will never be released is somewhere around 50, in the USA it's something like 50,000.
Maybe I'm a limp wristed liberal, but 'Three strikes' has always seemed utterly barbaric to me. Even its name being based on a sports metaphor seems totally inappropriate for something so serious.
Wow -- US population is roughly 5x the UK population, yet we have 1000x people serving life sentences ... I can't help but think of that quote that we should judge the state of a society by the state of their prisons ...
I really wish we could do something to dramatically change the prison system in the US -- its insane how much horrible inertia guides its current trajectory ... Given how much more we know about humans than we did 200 years ago, why aren't there better ideas on the role of prison and the justice system disciplining their mutual evolution than were available in the past?
I don't think the problem is a lack of ideas for a better prison system, it's that people don't care. Most people assume that they'll never be in prison and that the people who are deserve what they get—and that's if they think about it at all.
If a politician does come along and try to change the system, he's got to convince a lot of his colleagues that don't have a lot of reason to do anything, and he's got to worry someone else will come along and tell voters he's worried about making life good for criminals instead of better for good people.
Maybe I'm a limp wristed liberal, but 'Three strikes' has always seemed utterly barbaric to me. Even its name being based on a sports metaphor seems totally inappropriate for something so serious.