[The Man]

I don’t really feel bad for him specifically, but his suicide does sort of raise an issue about prison conditions in this country, because they’re so horrible that a lot of people would rather commit suicide than face life in prison. Life imprisonment strikes me as intrinsically troubling, because, particularly with the conditions in our prison system, it’s essentially a sentence to death by (emotional) torture.

To be clear, I don’t believe some people can be rehabilitated, and the only two choices for those people are either to kill them (which is far too great a power to trust to the state) or to keep them in prison (or a mental institution, I guess) for life. But life sentences without parole are themselves incredibly cruel, and outside of extreme cases like Anders Breivik and Dylann Roof, I don’t think we can know ahead of time who is incapable of being rehabilitated. It’s also not proper to make legislation based on edge cases, because most people aren’t such clear psychopaths, and trusting the judicial system to identify those psychopaths reliably is giving it far too much power, particularly given its clear biases racially and otherwise.

Still, the point of “when does someone cease being a danger to the public, and how can we identify it?” is a good question that deserves serious investigation. But societies with prison systems that focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment have surprisingly low recidivism rates (much lower than American citizens would expect them to), so it appears that they are fairly good at identifying it.

Norway has a maximum initial sentence of twenty-one years, IIRC. They also have a review process whereby, if a prisoner is deemed a continued danger to the public, they will not be released for as long as that continues to be the case (I believe they investigate this in two-year intervals). As I said, their recidivism rate is quite low. I doubt that Breivik will ever be allowed to leave prison, because he will probably never be rehabilitated. At the same time, I’m not comfortable with a justice system that unilaterally declares that a given person cannot be rehabilitated, because such a system will inevitably implement such judgements in biased manners (racially or otherwise). Furthermore, a surprising number of people do appear to be capable of rehabilitation. Varg Vikernes is still a far-right-wing shithead, for example, but there’s been no sign that he’s repeated the crimes that got him imprisoned since being released (arson and murder), nor that he is particularly likely to do so.

Another problem is that people can be falsely convicted for life imprisonment just as they can for the death penalty, and death penalty prisoners often get far more attention from activists trying to free those wrongly imprisoned than those imprisoned for life do, because of the inevitability of a death penalty. But if you are wrongly imprisoned for life and never get out, you’ve been murdered by the state just as much as you have been if you were given the death penalty.

So, yeah, don’t really give a shit that Hernandez killed himself in and of itself. There appears to be no reasonable doubt of his guilt and he seemed substantially less likely to be rehabilitated than a number of other people who receive life imprisonment sentences do. But the concept of life imprisonment is troubling overall, and it’s a topic that deserves far more consideration.