- WASHINGTON -- 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.
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- 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 yesterday.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/13/
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