A living death: Sentenced to die behind bars for what?

Maybe, just maybe, the ACLU account is deliberate fuzzy on the details? It's difficult to conciliate the claim that the accused "borrowed" the truck with the allegation that the co-worker found the truck missing.

"taking a wallet from a hotel room" - we blame it on the court appointed lawyer. He's already been convicted and sent to jail twice for burglary and he continues to break into other peoples places and steal their stuff. Poor guy just took a wallet from those rich vacationing golfers. Screw that. If I was there I'd be scared to death. How many times do we let him keep doing this. Stop doing it stupid.

"stealing tools from a tool shed" - oh he was just riding along. sure he was. already been convicted multiple times for burglary. The fact that he desperately misses his children does not make him less guilty of continuing to break into other peoples places and taking their things. Stop doing that stupid.

"borrowing a co-workers truck" - i think there is clearly more to this story. generally speaking, people don't normally drive other people's trucks 3 states away without letting them know. If it really was harmless, i'd expect the other guy to not press charges or testify on his behalf. Hey guys, it was just a misunderstanding I thought someone else took it. Also, "inadvertently killing someone" is a really nice way of saying he beat the shit out of someone in a fight and the guy died.

Perhaps some of these don't deserve life, but I don't really have that much of a problem with it. Maybe we could lower it to 20-30 years, but I have no problems with escalating penalties. If you are a productive member of society this isn't a problem. These mini-articles are all worded as if these people didn't do anything wrong and just made a tiny mistake this one time and now they are in prison forever. Not the case. Most of them made pretty big mistakes, and they made them repeatedly.

I am against prison or jail for any non-violent offense beyond fines or 'outpatient' like corrections, they cost much less and might actually help. They keep the individual contributing and don't subject people to a further life of crime locking them up, especially drug offenses when it is really most likely an illness or a non-issue.

If, when they gave a sentence, they reported the projected cost of that sentencing maybe some of this would change?

Things to try to help this:

1) Create common sense filters for sentencing so non-violent criminals or repeat offenses serve no more than x amount of years for a crime or remove jail/prison for non-violence altogether.

2) When sentencing is handed down, the projected cost of that sentence should also be read with the sentence except in extreme cases of violent sentencing. All non-violent sentencing should have a price right next to it so people understand what it really means. i.e. caught with a small amount of drugs = 10 years * 30k per year = 300,000 to put this person away for nothing. Right after that it lists their projected income and loss in taxes. Then a net benefit total which in this case is probably around 500k of economic value for this one offense.

Stupid events like this wouldn't happen if we changed this: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/video-shows-man-dyi...

Technology changing society is another side to this. In the past, laws were not only there to dissuade people from doing undesirable behavior but were also more lax and harder to get caught. Nowadays everything is tracked and aggressive laws are now problematic because it isn't just a dissuading factor anymore it is a certainty. If there is something that probably shouldn't be illegal but is based on this past we could be in trouble. So all laws or things like this with non-violence being locked up and a private prison industry run amuck, we need to change drastically soon. People are human and they can mess up, our systems for corrections sometimes mess up the rest of their lives for one momentary lapse of reason.