"Life in Prison without Parole."

What a bizarre idea. Why would a government put one of its citizens in a little box for the rest of that person's life? Is that man (see note) officially no longer a member of the republic? Can he no longer contribute to or function within society? Is he out for good? And if so, why take the trouble to keep him fed and sheltered? Why not just kill him?

Now, don't get me wrong and assume that I'm in favor of capital punishment; I'm not. But this is the crux of my view: that there is no ideological difference between killing someone and putting him in prison for the rest of his life. When society locks someone up until they die, society effectively says, "We give up. This man cannot be a part of us, and we cannot function with this man as a member. We have determined that he cannot be rehabilitated, so will remove him from society by putting him somewhere we can forget about him and where he will not be able to harm us." The only real difference between this and capital punishment is one of guts; the key issue is to remove the bad element from society, but it takes a certain amount of resolve to do it by killing instead of imprisonment.

In fact, I'm willing to go even further: I'm willing to theorize that all imprisonment, not just life imprisonment, is essentially the same concept. Society says, "We will take this individual out of circulation for a while. He will not contribute to or receive the benefits of society, and later on we will allow him back in, and we'll see if he has changed his ways." In other words, if it were possible to kill a criminal for only a few years, then revive him and allow him back into society, then that would be a suitable parallel to the similarity between life imprisonment and the death penalty. But, more on this later.

Right now I want to move to the second key issue here. People can exist without the state. The result is either chaos or anarchy, but it can happen. However, the state cannot exist without the people. From this I draw the following: the state must exist on behalf of the people, and not vice versa. It is not the citizen's duty to preserve the state, it is the other way around. Thus, the state should not wrong its people for the sake of the state: if it does then the state betrays its very reason for existence; and a state that does so need not exist.

So it seems to me that the state should not have the right to execute its own citizens. To do so violates the charter that the state operates on behalf of its citizens. Now, this is a tenuous point, I'll admit. It is an issue that, in the end, is almost entirely decided by personal opinion, unlike, say, teaching creation in schools. However, even if you don't agree with me on this point, bear with me for a minute for its ramifications.

I am claiming that it is not defensible for the state to execute one of its subjects. But if you accept that premise, then based on my previous arguments, the state should not have the right to remove someone from its own society by life imprisonment. And further, based on that, I posit that, if the state is truly for the benefit of its people, then imprisonment for any length of time is by extension indefensible.

Alright, let's slow down. Admittedly, this is an unusual thesis. And admittedly, all I have done so far is made abstract, ideological claims. All societies have crime, and how can a society function without punishing the criminal element? And how can a society punish criminals, except by imprisonment? These are valid questions. In truth, I can think of only two alternatives to imprisonment, though there may be others.

The first is banishment. If a society cannot function without harming some of its citizens in order to preserve itself, then the only alternative is to go outside the limits of the society. In other words, instead of harming or killing criminals for breaking the law, simply remove them from the contract and protection of the state. By doing so, you remove the harmful elements, and uphold the charter that the society protects those of its members who in return honor that charter. However, this is a big modern world, with borders and passports, and we can no longer just send convicts to Australia because we don't want them.

Therefore, the only remaining option I see is rehabilitation. Think about it a second. Imprisonment is just something society does to a problem that it doesn't know how to solve. But what it should be doing is rehabilitation. Rehabilitation might look like prison, and it may involve keeping lawbreakers away from society long enough to be rehabilitated. But the point is different. For example, the time spent away would have to depend not on the severity of the crime, but on the amount of rehabilitation required. But more importantly, the isolation of the criminal would not be punishment, it would merely be a side-effect of the rehabilitation process.

Okay, supposing that anyone is going along with me this far, there are still big questions left. In general, we know how to rehabilitate a drug addict. (We don't often do it, but we know how.) But what about other crimes? How do we rehabilitate a murderer? Who decides how we do such a thing? Further, how do we know when we're done? What if it doesn't work and he kills again, do we banish him, imprison him, kill him, or try rehabilitation again?

These are very tough questions. I don't know the answers. You probably don't either. No-one does. But I still feel, in my gut, that imprisoning criminals for some length of time and then releasing them is wrong. So I feel that these are the questions we should be asking, and and trying to answer. I have often heard that rehabilitation is cheaper than imprisonment. (I'm thinking of drug issues here, so I don't know if it translates.) However, rehabilitation is much much more difficult. People cannot be mass-rehabilitated like sheep. People cannot be rehabilitated by forgetting about them or pretending they don't exist. People cannot be rehabilitated without society, as a whole, paying attention to its own flaws and choosing to correct them.

And that's why we'll always have prisons.