As for Schembri’s family, I’m glad you wrote what you did. The father is such a decent, humble and “old world” polite man, that it is hard to imagine what he is going through at the moment, along with the other members of the family. Yes, they too are victims in this case.

[Daphne – Some people don’t have the imagination to see that it is much worse to be the father of the murderer than the father of the victim in a case like this.]

[Daphne – Oh dear, here’s another one. Life doesn’t mean 25 years. Please make the distinction clear in your head. Life means life, but despite that, nobody spends longer than 25 years in jail because one way or another the prison authorities need to clear out that house.]

[Daphne – Please explain how a person can be sentenced to life imprisonment four times in a row. Did he get out of jail while serving a life sentence to commit the other crimes?]

[Daphne – You know, I’m really amazed that some people find this so hard to understand. Wherever in the world people are sentenced to life, it means just that, life – otherwise it would be called something else, like for example, 25 years. But despite being sentenced to life imprisonment, in no western democracy that I can think of other than the USA are people actually kept in prison until they die, despite being sentenced to life imprisonment. This is because the state has no interest in turning the jails into old people’s homes, or in keeping doddering old men in jail just for the hell of it, and just because there’s no point in doing so when the person is not a threat. So they are let out on parole, or pardoned, or whatever, but the fact is that they are not kept in prison longer than a couple of decades. There are some exceptions, as with, notoriously, Myra Hindley (I mention her because she’s the first one to spring to mind), but apart from that – they’re let out one way or another, even though life means life on paper. Another factor influencing this is that people live much longer now. They no longer routinely die at 65 or 70, and animals in captivity live longer than they do in the wild. So whereas in the first half of the 20th century, sentencing a man of 40 to life in prison might mean that he died at 65 anyway, nowadays you’re looking at 50 years in jail, which is ludicrous. Do you understand now?]

From a ‘deterrence’ perspective, there is no justification to detain a person for life. The most effective type of deterrence is physical deterrence, such as target hardening (a fence) or police patrols. The deterrent value of what comes after being caught is less significant. No would-be perpetrator would stop to think about the difference between 5 and 10 years imprisonment. He does not intend to to be caught in the first place. This is evidenced by the high rate of relapsers, which largely shows that specific deterrence works even less than generic. (Generic deterrence applies to the largely law-abiding population as a whole).

As to rehabilitation, there is clearly no justification here since life imprisonment defeats the aims. Rehabilitation, a post-WWII positivist fad, has been out of fashion since it became clear that institutional cages do not rehabilitate people but break them down.

Then comes incapacitation – which is wholly utilitarian in application. A person is imprisoned in order to stop him from committing more crimes – not for his own sake but for the sake of the community. But generally speaking people prone to criminal behaviour mature and straighten out by the age of 35-40. The more time they spend being treated like dogs in a state institution, the longer it takes for them to straighten out. In any case, it is unlikely that a 60-year-old would seek to commit serious crimes once he’s out of prison.

It is largely in the Land of the Free that they have geriatric prisons for those who were not electrocuted, gassed or injected with poison by the state. In the US, the prison population is now reaching 1000 persons per 100,000 population (mostly for non-violent, drug related crimes). So with 5% of the world population, the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners. To give you some perspective, at that rate Malta would have housed 4000 prisoners at Corradino. Nearly every family in Malta would have been acquainted to a prisoner. The rate in Malta was around 35/100k in the 1970s and now it stands at around 80-90/100k (mostly foreigners). In Europe it averages around 100-120/100k – and always rising, especially in the UK where it must be close to 200/100k by now.

And is there less crime? Of course not – that’s not how it works. What they have been doing for the past 30-40 years is creating more crime through the very same actions aimed at preventing it… but that would take volumes for its not mainstream at all. In the Pollyanna world, we will succeed if only we could enact more laws with higher sentences, have more police on the streets and build more prisons(Parkinson’s law then sets in). No wonder they now have 14 FEMA camps in the US – sparkling new and empty, ready to take in guests. But Obama will close Guantanamo… so the problem is solved.

Cineaste.
Straight tip though. Seems to be a good movie. Very realistic, they say.

@Leo Said
What’s your point? I simply wrote about what I have heard is done from acquantances that served as jurors. I have never served as a juror myself nor have I ever been in any position to give such advice!