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127,000
lifers in America’s jails
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A decade of ‘get tough on crime’ campaigns -
especially demands that a life sentence should mean life
- has created a record total of 127,000 lifers in the American
prison system, almost double the figure in 1992 and four
times the 1983 level.
Recent moves to toughen sentencing laws have led to an unprecedented
explosion in life sentences, including imposing terms without
any chance of parole, the liberal Washington think-tank,
the Sentencing Project, said.
‘Lifers’ now account for one in 11 of all those
in US prisons. A quarter are serving life without parole
and can expect to die behind bars.
Levels of violent crime have dropped by a third in the past
decade, a trend that supporters of tough sentencing hail
as proof that prison works.
But the Sentencing Project’s report argued that politicians
have ignored real crime trends as they vied to appear tough
on offenders, and taken away important discretionary powers
from judges.
The report singled out six states - Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana,
Maine, Pennsylvania and South Dakota - where all those sentenced
to life must serve without any hope of parole.
Such laws amount to a ‘virtual abandonment of the
principles of rehabilitation that had been central to the
nation’s correctional philosophy’, the authors
of the report said.
The report singled out California’s ‘three strikes
and you’re out’ law as diverging from the rest
of the western world. Under this, a third felony conviction,
no matter how minor, can mean life.
The number in jail is now more than 2.1 million, of whom
885,000 are black, though they comprise only 12 per cent
of the population.
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