If you ask children what the purpose of a punishment is, most
will say “to learn your lesson.” This is why life imprisonment
and the death penalty don’t make much sense to them. Yet in the
United States alone, 140,000 people are currently serving life
sentences, and 41,000 of them have no chance of ever getting
released. Meanwhile, more than 3,200 people were on death row by
the end of 2011, also in the United States. Recently, a 10-year-
old child from my daughter’s class asked me this pertinent
question: “What’s the point of learning your lesson if you never
get a chance to show that you did?” The answer is simple: not
much. Unfortunately, rehabilitation (the adult word for
“learning a lesson”) is often not at the heart of criminal
justice reform. In fact, the harshness of a punishment is
frequently not determined by the possibility of recidivism, but
rather by public opinion. Take, for example, sex offenders in
the United States. Long sentences and additional punitive
measures such as sex registries and zon