What's the rationale for that limit? Is that the maximum time it takes to reform someone? The time after which anyone's being a threat to society expires? The magic number of years for just retribution for all (combinations of) crimes?
On a practical level, I believe the idea is that longer sentences do not provide any additional deterrent. Nor do they provide better opportunities for reintegration. Both effects probably see decreasing marginal utility with longer sentences. Even more practical: most violent crimes are committed by males aged 18 to 30. 18 + 16 = 34.
On an ethical level, European law often relies on the concept of 'dignity' which is ill-defined but (for this purpose) interpreted to mean that even hideous crimes do not justify the destruction of all of a person's future.
As a family of concepts human rights often rely on the concept of dignity, so all law (or ethics) -- European, American, African, Samoan, Caribbean, Peruvian, whatever -- that is based on or significantly influenced by human rights often also relies on the concept of dignity. But yeah, as you say, the concept is so broad and, without a substantiating framework, generally empty of meaning that I can imagine that (though not how) some could use it to say that even 1) planning and intentionally murdering 77 innocent people and then 2) going on to remain unreformed and unrepentant of it shouldn't "justify the destruction of all of a person's future". (Though, thankfully, as far as I know, people who think like that so far either 1) lack the courage of their convictions or 2) lack the power (or both) to actually impose that view of 'dignity' on any society.)
The rational for such limits in Europe is always the same: the law of diminishing returns. Increasing the max sentence after a certain point no longer has any impact on crime rates, so why do it? It costs money and creates unnecessary human suffering.
Notice that Europeans do not place the same importance on retribution as Americans do. You hear less talk of "paying your debt to society" and such things. The modern European justice system is mostly seen as a mechanism of deterrence. I suspect that this is because Europe is more secular.
In that respect I see these short sentences for very serious crimes (multiple murders, etc) to be more dangerous than helpful.
Obviously it's only a problem in countries where you have significant levels of violent crimes.
At least that's how it works in Finland. The whole system is designed to get people to become productive and healthy citizens with minimal suffering, not to provide retribution.
You can accept that, adjust your goals and move forward or deal with the inevitable frustration and anger of being unable to get vengeance for the rest of your life.
On that view, it's generally just right to reward people for good and punish them for evil. Consequences -- even grand ones like balancing the cosmic scales of justice -- don't enter it.
For the same reason the severity of the sentence should be driven by the aversion of the society to the crime committed more than considerations on what will happen to the criminal after the sentence has been executed.
Punishment and rehabilitation are just parts of achieving the goal: Punishment tries to prevent further crime, both by the person being punished, and people that know what will happen to them if they are caught. Rehabilitation is great when it succeeds: Sending a rapist out to do more raping isn't so great.
All of our policies about punishment, rehabilitation and enforcement quality are tradeoffs, and the question is what's the best tradeoffs. The biggest one, IMO, has little to do with the size of the punishment (they are all pretty big), but with deterrence. Nobody is going to stop killing someone because they'll "only" get 15 years in jail. 15 years in jail is horrible for most people that aren't living in terrible conditions outside. The real kick is in chances of getting caught. The criminal believes that he won't get caught, so the size of the punishment is not necessarily that relevant, other than in keeping the person that committed the crime away from doing the same again outside of jail (crime vs other immates happens!). Improved enforcement quality, and making sure that people just don't even want to do criminal things, regardless of the punishment, is where it's at.
The problem with that is that enforcement itself is a tradeoff: We could do a lot to prevent crime in NYC if 25% of people were in some form of law enforcement (including policing the police), but it'd be a tradeoff we'd all be unwilling to make, because it'd be very wasteful.
So it's nowhere ear as simple as you paint it.
The goal is peace. It has to be peace. You might never reach that goal entirely but you can try and you want people that ensure peace exists and people that restore it once it has been violated.
Quite clearly exerting vengeance through the justice system is not the best way to achieve that goal, in fact it's obviously by far the worst.
That's why from feudal to modern societies, the Lord / King / Judge renders justice. The system becomes just again by the retaliation being decided and executed by a higher form of authority.
If someone beats me up, and we both go in front of the judge and the judge decides to do nothing because of some procedural reason or because doing nothing would benefit some greater social good, this is the very definition of injustice.
I am not saying that a justice system shouldn't care about rehabilitating criminals after they serve their sentence, but that negating the punitive role is negating the very reason why the justice system exists and is accepted.
That means justice is combination of deterrence and rehabilitation to a. discourage behaviours that are detrimental to society as a whole and b. to ensure that the offender ceases that behaviour and becomes a productive member of society again.
'Punishment' can play as small or as large a part in point (a) as you want, but the more you make it a large part of (a), the less success you will have with point (b). And failing at point (b) means you effectively fail point (a) - ie offenders coming out of the justice system who can't integrate back into society often reoffend.
Americans are a scary people.
Per capita you incarcerate more people than any other major country (developed or not).
There is also a quote of Gandhi I cannot find. So I'll paraphrase: If you are angry at someone, and he did not intend to hurt you, you should not be angry. If he did intend to hurt you, he is not as wise/it's in his nature, and you should not be angry.
If we follow your logic it is. Retribution would only serve the British girl but not the community. The community has nothing to gain from punishing the prince but everything to loose from loosing all these Saudi contracts. If you think justice is only about serving the community, not about retribution then you will happily approve the decision of the court. My personal position is that it is the very negation of justice, and that behaving this way jeopardize the acceptance of the judicial system by the population.
As for Gandhi, it's similar to the Christian "if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also". But I am not sure that a recipe that worked well against a democratic British parliament will work as well when facing a violent thug.
What? Why shouldn't I be angry if a fool intentionally hurts me?
The way people are treated shouldn't be based on what the most emotionally invested people want. What makes the person rehabilitated is that they don't do the crime again, and nothing else. You can't cause wrongdoing to someone who is dead, so the only downside to releasing the person is you might feel sad. Only if you dwell on it for the rest of your life. But you won't, people move on.
And you think it's an indictment on Biblical (and, apparently, also Oxonion) definitions of "fair" that they'd disagree with you on that?
"Just or appropriate" doesn't actually say anything about what should be done in a case of rape+murder. Who's to say life in prison is appropriate? I don't think it is. It's a waste. The young lady wasn't put in a hellish environment for a lifetime. And what do we as a society gain by wasting money on prisoners for exactly zero return on investment? We're basically punishing ourselves to spend that money. Better to wait until the problem is solved (i.e. we don't think they'll do it again) and let them out where they can do something useful.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the largest prison population in the world and a much higher violent crime rate than the vast majority of western countries. Objectively, the justice system in the US is inferior to the European system. This is not a matter of opinion or ideology, there is strong empirical evidence.
Handy graph: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/09/c...
If you could compare populations like that, then for instance the idea of banning guns to reduce the number of shootings in the US would be defeated by the example of Switzerland where pretty much every man has an assault riffle at home, and where you see little to no crime, and certainly no mass shooting. But the reality is that Swiss citizens behave differently than US citizens.
The comparison shows that it is possible to have low violent crime rates and low incarceration rates. After seeing that this is possible, I cannot understand why a country like the US would not go after these two goals. I am inclined to suspect that it has something to do with turning the prison system into a private business and the predominance of puritanism in American culture.
And let's not exaggerate the cultural differences between the US and Europe. We are talking about western democracies, stemming from the same intellectual source (the Enlightenment) and the same genetic source: the US was created by Europeans, and mostly consists to this day of people of European descent (yes, including "hispanics", as the name implies).
> the idea of banning guns to reduce the number of shootings in the US would be defeated by the example of Switzerland
The idea that banning guns is a requirement to have a peaceful society is effectively defeated by the Swiss example. It show that private gun ownership cannot be the ultimate cause of the problem.
By the way, the graph that is shown somewhere else, comparing incarceration and violent crime rates, shows no correlation between the two. A concept of "eras" has to be introduced to allow one to talk about these two metrics together.
Yes, but the statistics for violent crime in the US break down in interesting ways once you start looking at "genetic source", whatever that is. There is lots of discussion as to the _why_, of course
"Hispanics" in the US includes people of nearly pure European descent, nearly pure Amerindian descent, mixes of the two, etc. It's a pretty useless demographic category, really.
First of all, most countries with a life sentence does not have an upper bound (would be silly to call it life inprisonment), but rather a practice with an average sentence of such a length. There is nothing that prevents someone who is consideered dangerous to be kept in prison longer.
Second: Those who are kept the longest behind bars are those who are sentenced to psychiatric treatment (It's actually odd that you can be sentenced to psychicatric treatment, but you can in many european countries). That is essentially "you'll get out when you are no longer dangerous to yourself or others", which in many cases can be much longer than even the longest prison sentences. Many mass murderes and similar will be in this category.
Third: the idea behind short sentences is diminishing returns, the responsibility of the system to reform the convicted (if they fail it's their fault) and perhaps most of all - econonomic reasons. Unless I see concrete evidence that longer sentences are actually cost effective for keeping me safer, I'm not going to allow politicians to make such laws.
Cost effectiveness is key. One can't just argue that longer sentences automatically makes the streets safer, since it costs a lot. You have got to compare, dollar for dollar, with the effect spending the same money on (for example) Police, Drug treatment, Education, Job creation, ...
So the fundamental assumption is not that all criminals will reform, but that most will, others will at least reform enough to not be dangerous enough that the cost of keeping them in prison is worth it to society - the money can be better spent elsewhere.
That's a strange use of the word "secular", for which the Oxford dictionary that Google uses lists as "not connected with religious or spiritual matters". What's particularly religious or spiritual about the idea that the justice system ought to be about meting justice?
Secular societies are more interested in the outcomes than the moral righteousness of the system.
Not all secular societies or people are consequentalists. Some are at least as interested in the moral righteousness of a system -- in its means, in its processes, in what it does on the way to its ends -- as they are in what that system accomplishes. There are secular humanist deontologists and virtue ethicists.
However that is not quite the whole story. In Sweden, a life sentence is a sentence with no upper bound on the time, if you were immortal, you would be there forever. But, usually you are considered rehabilitated after, say, 10-16 years, if you indeed show signs that you have rehabilitated. Then there is no need to keep you locked up.
The "max X years" is meant as the number for which it took the longest time for someone to be considered rehabilitated. In the Swedish sense of it, it is not a "magic" number, but a case-by-case number.
EDIT: the user "nl" quotes the wikipedia article for Denmark in another reply which indicates it is more or less the same.
Denmark had a guy who killed 4 policemen. They let him out 33 years later on a pardon; by then he was 71 and had server about 33 years.