By Parker Bach
Shoplifting a jacket. Serving as a middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. Stealing a loaf of bread to feed starving children. These are three illegal acts, yes, but decidedly minor offenses. Yet all three earned their perpetrators decades in prison.
Yes, one of these examples comes from 19th century French literature. In Victor Hugo’sLes Misérables, Jean Valjean is famously transformed into a threat to society by the injustice of a five-year sentence for merely stealing a loaf of bread. Imagine the injustice if it were a life sentence.
The other two crimes – shoplifting and facilitating the sale of marijuana – are very real incidents from the United States today. They were deemed worthy of life sentences. Moreover, these are the stories of only two out of 3,278 prisoners sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent crimes, according to a 2014 study by the ACLU, titled “A Living Death.”
For some crimes – murder, rape, treason – life without parole might be justified. For nonviolent crimes, especially minor ones such as those mentioned above, life in prison is absurd. These sentences are disproportionate to the crimes committed, target certain racial groups inequitably, cost the country large sums of money, and – most importantly – unjustly ruin the lives of low-level offenders.
In the past 20 years, the number of life sentences issued in the United States has increased by 400%. Unless violent crime is skyrocketing at alarming rates, the problem lies not in the crimes, but in the legal system.
One element of the current legal system contributing massive increase in mass incarceration is certainly the “War on Drugs,” as 79% of prisoners sentenced to life without parole for a non-violent crime are charged with a drug-related offense. While drug use and legalization are political issues subject to a variety of viewpoints, this should be a bipartisan issue. No drug crime should necessitate the forfeit of an entire lifetime to the US prison system.
Retaining drug offenders and other criminals in prison for life is far from cheap. What do politicians on both sides of the aisle love more than reducing the budget deficit? With the national debt climbing ever higher, restricting the budget remains a bipartisan issue. Holding 3,278 prisoners for life will not only cost the United States government $1.8 billion, but it will prevent the prisoners from returning to the workforce, where they could contribute to the GDP. If the tenants of justice and proportionality do not motivate policymakers to change the present system, perhaps simple economic facts will do the trick.
Nor is this simply a financial scourge on the nation, but a social one, given the highly disproportionate rate of African American prisoners in these circumstances. According to the 2015 Census, black Americans made up just 13.3% of the population, but 65% of the prisoners serving life without parole for nonviolent crimes. It does not take a statistician to see the obvious disparity in these figures. For decades, perhaps centuries, the American justice system has been criticized for disproportionately targeting black Americans. Issuing life sentences for nonviolent crimes is one way in which this bias continues even today. Eliminating this practice might not solve the larger trend of discrimination, but it would be a start.
While mass incarceration for life has significant adverse effects on a national scale, it would be a mistake to overlook the suffering it causes in the lives and mental states of the prisoners. In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean bears the mental scars of his nineteen years in prison for his entire life. One modern life prisoner, Raffaelous White, described his imprisonment as “a living nightmare, all my hopes and dreams are fading away.”The Sentencing Project determined that cases of depression and suicidal tendencies are significantly more likely for prisoners serving life without parole than for those who are parole-eligible. In short, prison itself is not the only punishment a life sentence entails.
The debate might be different if this were a global issue, but all evidence shows that it is distinctly American. Over 100 countries have signed the Rome Statute, requiring review of life sentences after 25 years for offenses of all levels of severity. The United States has not. Meanwhile, according to a study by the University of San Francisco School of Law, our per capita rate of prisoners serving life without parole is 51 times that of Australia and 173 times that of the United Kingdom.
International law states that prison sentences are to be reformative and have the ultimate goal of reintegrating prisoners into society. The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution bars cruel and unusual punishment. I agree with the ACLU that current trend of life without parole for nonviolent crimes violates both. I believe Victor Hugo would agree too. It is time for the United States to abandon the harsh legality of Inspector Javert in favor of the compassionate mercy of Monsieur Myriel. Perhaps, like Jean Valjean, these 3,728 prisoners have far more good to contribute to the world, and need only grace to bring it out of them.