What does life in prison mean when life is indefinite?

I was listening to the radio the other day and an NPR program was talking about the length of prison terms. The length of sentences relative to various crimes are a popular field of discussion within society and one about which there is often significant disagreement. How long does one have to serve to make recompense for a given infraction and what does it mean in terms of justice and restitution that someone was punished? These are questions which it is hard to find answers and many arguments hold value. There are no easy answers here and the difficulty may be exacerbated with longer human lifespans. In particular it affects the question of what it means to have a life sentence.

Currently the choice of allowing people to live out their natural lives in a prison environment is often seen as a more human option for individuals who in the past may well have been sentenced to death. Life expectancy in many places has increased substantially however, and there is reason to believe it may expand significantly in the future. This may give us reason to pause and consider the morality and meaning of life in prison in light of much longer or even indefinite lifespans.

Lifetime imprisonment is generally used as a punishment for those who are not deemed safe to allow to return to society either because their crimes are extremely heinous or because they have continuously and repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to conform the rules of conduct which govern society as a whole. In either case it is presumed that the damage of allowing these people to return to the larger world would be too great to be borne. So they are locked away in various levels of detention until they die of 'natural causes' or suffer some other terrible fate within a prisons walls.

So what happens if 'natural causes' takes a thousand years or never comes at all? Do we continue to incarcerate individuals indefinitely for finite crimes? It is true that some sentences are simply for extremely long periods such as six hundred years which is effectively a life sentence since it goes beyond the lifetime of any known individual to date. It is safely assumed that they will not live out that much actual time. However if the life extensionist movements are successful there could be a real possibility of reaching those sentence times. At which point we have to ask if they remain a valid choice. During all that time after all, that person must remain incarcerated and there is a societal and resource cost for it. We have shown such costs are ones we are willing to bear for a lifetime at this point but should they continue on so much longer?

To keep a person incarcerated for an indefinite lifespan may eventually become a fate worse than death. One of the key freedoms often discussed among those who support indefinite lifespans is the right to die. This is so important for the same reasons that so much of classical fiction has suggested that immortality could be a curse rather than a blessing. It is the last great freedom a person has in their life to escape whatever fate they may have found themselves in. If we prevent those in prison from having access to this right and freedom and cause them to just keep living in misery that seems to be an indefinite punishment for a finite crime. At the least then we need to give to prisoners the same right to die as that granted to any other sentient should it become too unbearable.

So as long as they have a way out indefinite prison may seem at first somewhat redeemable as a concept. After all we can afford to keep people in for their entire lives now and these are the individuals who cannot be returned to society since they are too much of a threat. There will be many more options in the future though and some exist even now though we do not choose to use such methods. A few examples are included here:

The first is simply to remove such individuals from society in such a way that they need not be incarcerated but also cannot be a threat. Historically this was frequently done by various forms of banishment. One of the most famous was the use of Australian continent by Britain as a penal colony. Prisoners would simply be brought in and dropped off free to live out their life as they chose within the new space. One may imagine a remote corner of mars or a modified asteroid used for similar purpose. A more interesting possibility though thinking of future societies could be something akin to the matrix in which the convicted spend most of their time in a virtual world where they are free to interact and improve themselves in open and free spaces with no societal risk.

Another might be to freeze or similarly remove them from society for the long term. This is a limited option however as at some point they would need to be revived and would have had little time to change or become people who could healthily operate within the larger society.

A third would of course be to limit sentences with maximums set such that they do not reach egregious lengths. This avoids some of the ethical conundrums but leaves issues where we might still see people being released who may not yet be prepared to reenter the larger society without causing damage. This is the closest the current system and the same problem is reflected in most modern sentencing.

Perhaps the best solution in the long term though is to find more options besides prison for people. Putting a person in prison cuts them off from their normal support sources and isolates them in a difficult and often unhealthy environment. This is not a good prescription for reform and improvement. It is typically used as a means of punishment for crimes that do not warrant this kind of isolation from society because the act was not severely harmful to others. In the United States the most common such instance is drug use and abuse. Such people are seldom a serious threat to others and their recompense as well as treatment can be handled outside prison walls. This makes all the more sense when we are putting efforts in to help people who might otherwise languish behind walls for centuries. All their knowledge, skills, and unique aspects removed from providing benefit to the world. If we can find better ways to dealing with people than prison we will be much better placed to deal with the questions of whether and how long a sentence can before it becomes unreasonable.