Life in Prison: A Fate Worse than Execution?

For those of my readers who advocate the death penalty as the ultimate punishment — the ultimate justice — for the ultimate crime, I have a quote for you:

We are tired of dying a litttle bit each day. We have decided to die once and for all, and we ask that our penalties of life imprisonment be converted to penalties of death. To be now dead but not alive either — life imprisonment turns light into shadow, it kills you inside bit by bit: a death in small doeses. It renders life useless, makes the future seem the same as the past. It crushes the present and takes away hope. To a life prisoner, only life remains. But life without a future is less than nothing. It is flat and everlasting. Life imprisonment is the invention of an Antichrist with a malice that transcends the imagination. It is a victory over death, stronger than death itself.

This impassioned plea comes from 310 Italian murderers serving life sentences. Italy has no death penalty.

I advocate for an abolition of the death penalty becase I believe that people deserve a chance to redeem themselves in prison. That includes murderers. What’s more, it’s expensive and potentially cruel and unusual — see the research done on lethal injection methods — to put people to death.

Finally, I don’t believe that the state should have the right to kill people in any situation outside wartime.

But for those of you who believe that life in prison is letting murderers off easy, look at the 310 murderers who are begging for a release from their life-sentence torment via the very means you advocate as their ultimate punishment. Perhaps it’s time to rethink whether the death penalty is more than the lowest of the low deserve.