Should life imprisonment without parole be abolished?

[RFayette]

Yes, but keep the death penalty and use it more instead.

[RFayette]

i'd like to draw a small but important distinction: are we talking about "life imprisonment without parole" or "life imprisonment without the possibility of parole"?

When the sentence is imposed, it's almost certainly the latter.  In some places though, parole meant very little.  For instance, Texas used to allow all convicted of capital murder who were spared the death penalty eligibility for parole with their life sentences, but they almost never got parole. 

[RFayette]

Yes, but keep the death penalty and use it more instead.

That'll be great.  More incentive to hand out the death penalty, and more executions of innocent people.

If someone is innocent, they're far more likely to get acquitted if they are sentenced to death than with a life-without-parole sentence, given the large public media attention and appeal opportunities in capital cases.  LWOP is basically a death sentence, anyway. 

[RFayette]

Anyway, to respond to a couple of the above posts, what would you do if you could determine the fate of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?  Life without parole should only be available to the worst of the worst, but those people exist.

We're talking about life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Some people are obviously not fit to be released either because their crimes were just too grave (as examples you gave) or because they are too dangerous. But they are not a majority of cases.

This is fair.  As long as there's a culture on the parole board that certain criminals should never be allowed to go free, then there won't be much of a problem with giving a life sentence with the possibility of parole for a serial murderer.  Parole rules differ state-by-state and country-by-country.  For instance, in Greece, the maximum amount of a life sentence is 21 years, after which they are automatically paroled.  Needless to say, that's very different than the parole regimes in many other states.

[RFayette]

Anyone who opposes life imprisonment should have to detail what they think the appropriate sentences for various notorious mass murderers and when they should be released back into society.

That being said, the list of crimes that qualify for life imprisonment should be decreased, drug crimes should be struck entirely from it, and consecutive sentences should never be allowed to essentially equal a life sentence.

This is a far bigger problem than life-without-parole sentences, which are only really given for first-degree murder in most states.  When I hear about someone getting 250 years or whatever, I wish we just made a determination whether or not the person deserves the death penalty instead.

I still prefer death penalty to life-without-parole in those extreme cases, but otherwise I think the maximum sentence should be about 40 years.