Life Sentencing and the European Position on Punishment

• In Event: Towards a European Penology: Foundations, Key Principles and Challenges

Abstract

The matter of how to punish serious and violent crime is a universal problem for governments, for which most countries in the world turn to life imprisonment as an ultimate penalty. Yet, there are striking differences in the use and prevalence of life sentencing across nations. In the United States of America, for example, at a national level, roughly one in six people in prison is serving a life sentence, accounting for roughly 40% of the world’s life-sentenced population; of those, more than 55,000 people in the USA are serving sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP). Among European nations, while many (but not all) employ the life sentence, the numbers are far lower, and few European nations authorize an irreducible life sentence (the equivalent of LWOP). These contemporary trends are a product of historical patterns and conditions, including the divergent approaches to irreducible life sentencing taken by the United States Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. This presentation takes life sentencing as a lens from which to consider penal laws and practices and ways of thinking about punishment, tracing the development of life sentencing in the USA from the late nineteenth century to the present as a point of comparison and contrast with the European position(s) on punishment.

Author

• Christopher Seeds, University of California Irvine