(March 26, 2014 at 3:01 am)psychoslice Wrote: We are all going to die in the end, I think that is enough, like why make someone linger on just for revenge. it makes no sense.
Maybe that has to do with the Christian philosophy of eternal damnation and punishment and even lifetime chattel slavery. The criminal justice system in the old days was heavy on immediate physical punishment. When a person did something bad he was put in the stocks, whipped, tarred & feathered, branded, or even executed. No one was interested in locking people up for years on end. That's even true today in some of the muslim and European countries. The maximum prison sentence in Norway is just 21 years.
Once the American Christians gained power they thought that prison sentences would be more humane. So they built jails and prisons all over the land. Now the prisons are part of private enterprise and are operated as profit centers for investors. They demand a certain occupancy rate. So everything imaginable is becoming illegal that requires some time in jail or prison.
There's no incentive to release people from prison because the States have to pay a penalty if the prison occupancy rates fall too low. So once they get prisoners as inventory they want to keep them for as long as possible.
You can bet that if people could live for hundreds or thousands of years there would be millions of prisoners serving 500 to 10,000 year prison sentences in America.
