Cruel and unusual

I don't know how "unusual" it is, but my inmate friend in Michigan, who is in the 10th year of a 12-to-20-year sentence, was explaining to me how "deleterious" he finds this "judicial practice of sentencing a person to an indeterminate term with vast range of years between its minimum and maximum."

He cited several flavors of angst: "A psychological limbo whereby one is unable to formulate concrete steps of action for a plan for his future."

Secondly, the prisoner is "deprived of the psychological benefits attendant in the increasing realization that his freedom is drawing closer at hand. If a man knows for certain that in one year and 20 days he will be a free man, even if he is dying within he can hang on because of that certainty and the incrementally realized shortening of remaining days."

Thirdly, "a fundamental purpose of punitive incarceration . . . is for the offender to 'pay his debt' to society. . . . [The concept of debt paid] at least allows the prisoner a kind of relief in knowing that at a certain point the debt will have been paid in full. But even this dynamic is negated by an indeterminate sentence. . . . What our criminal justice system doesn't seem to realize is that when you construct a punishment in a nebulous rather than certain fashion, the arbitrary character of it robs it of whatever primitive value it may have had."

You probably think I have shared this to comment on prisons, but not so. What strikes me is that I have never put myself in this friend's shoes before, to imagine what he must feel like. It's a kind of mental laziness, this lack of "com-passion" or "sym-pathy." Come to think of it, in all the years of my childhood, I never spent five minutes thinking about what it must be like to be my mother.

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