Life Sentences, Penal Populism, and Security Confinement

This paper critically reflects on the normative and practical meaning and purpose of life sentences and long-term prison sentences, which essentially resembles life sentences in their effect. The analysis provides in-depth knowledge about current trends in the global abolitionist movement, showcasing the current opinio iuris on the jus cogens status of the safeguards against the death penalty. Fully subscribing to said opinio iuris, the authors discuss its likely implications in terms of a future rise in life sentences, focusing on their meaning and relation to long-term prison sentences. This is not only a matter of normative definition but also an important issue in comparative penology that empirically investigates the imposition of life sentences. To test their assumptions about the dubious labelling of essential life sentences as ordinary (long-term) prison sentences, a normative analysis of the current legal framework in nine European states (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany, France, and Switzerland) is presented in this paper. Preliminary findings show that what is labelled ‘life sentence’ in one jurisdiction tends to be a far less severe punishment than the sanction’s name might imply when compared to ‘ordinary (long-term) prison sentence’ in another jurisdiction. However, the matter is far more complex, as numerous states apply the so-called ‘security confinement’ as a security measure. Nevertheless, the authors find that in their effects, such security measures, although not labelled as sanctions, come dangerously close to actual sanctions such as life and long-term prison sentences, thereby normatively undermining current European human rights standards. Since there appears to be a rise in such ‘false labelling’, the phenomenon is considered in the context of penal populism and, in conclusion, discussed as a matter of the very foundations that criminal law builds upon in an attempt to suggest normative and practical solutions.