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Life without parole helps build anti-death penalty support |
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By Joe Towalski
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Wednesday, 29 July 2009 |
A report last week issued by the Sentencing Project, a national organization that works for a fair criminal justice system, pointed to the ongoing problem in the United States of racial disparities in sentencing and the challenges posed by the growing number of people who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
 Editorial
Joe Towalski
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In light of the report, the Sentencing Project is calling for the elimination of life-without-parole sentences.
While the organization’s desire to fix problems in the way justice is
allocated is certainly laudable, abolishing life without parole as a
sentencing option would be a mistake and undercut one of the strongest
arguments against capital punishment — that we as a society can keep
the most dangerous prisoners off the streets permanently and punish
them appropriately without resorting to state-sponsored executions.
Reform, not abolition
The Sentencing Project’s report points out that nearly one-third of
inmates serving life sentences — some 41,000 — have no possibility of
parole. Two-thirds of “lifers” are non-white.
Such racial disparities, which are also evident in the way the death
penalty is administered in the United States, point to the need for an
overhaul of the criminal justice system so that it is indeed just for
all, particularly the poor and people of color.
Sentences of life without parole should be given to only the most
dangerous and violent criminals who pose a persistent threat to public
safety. They should be handed out carefully, judiciously and as
infrequently as possible, but they shouldn’t be eliminated as a
sentencing option.
While the intention of those who propose eliminating
life-without-parole sentences isn’t to increase support for the death
penalty, it’s not difficult to imagine lawmakers and the judicial
system coming under added pressure to advocate for capital punishment
if permanent prison sentences are no longer a guaranteed option.
It would begin undoing the progress that has been made in recent years
in some states — thanks in large part to Catholics — to enact capital
punishment moratoriums and repeal death penalty laws. Such efforts have
been successful in part because of the support of church leaders, such
as Pope John Paul II, who called the death penalty “both cruel and
unnecessary,” and the U.S. bishops, who rightly pointed out in their
2005 statement “A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death” that “it is
time for our nation to abandon the illusion that we can protect life by
taking life.”
Choosing life over death
Unlike the death penalty, sentences of life without parole, when
administered properly, cost the public less and uphold the human
dignity of crime victims as well as perpetrators who have an
opportunity while in prison to reform and rehabilitate their lives.
Life without parole is a better option than the death penalty, and it
is a necessary one if efforts to abolish capital punishment are to be
successful.
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