Only U.S., South Africa Have No-Parole Terms

While 130 countries have the death penalty, only the United States and South Africa have life without parole, human rights experts said.

“I don’t know of that kind of sentence elsewhere,” said Aryeh Neier, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

A key reason for the spread of life without parole in the United States is its endorsement by opponents of the death penalty, who hope its availability will forestall executions.

In South Africa, Neier said, it has been used in political cases. But recipients of the sentence, such as African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, have been offered freedom if they renounce violence.

Death Penalty Avoided

South Africa, along with most African and Asian countries, employs the death penalty. But Western European democracies such as Switzerland, Denmark, Great Britain and West Germany stopped executing criminals decades ago. Life sentences in those countries typically result in paroles after less than 20 years, said Tanya Sapko, a researcher for Amnesty International.

The idea of parole did not take hold until the turn of the century, according to Columbia University historian David Rothman. Before that, people served whatever time they were sentenced to. But penal reformers in this country argued that convicts would have a greater incentive to reform if their terms were made indeterminate. Prison authorities were pleased because hope for early release encouraged inmates to behave.

The move to life without parole is the ultimate expression of a return to wider use of fixed sentences that began in this country in the late 1970s.

In some other countries, parole is unknown, but there are no life terms. In the Soviet Union, for example, where death is imposed far more frequently than in the United States, the maximum prison sentence is 20 years. There is a catch, however, said Cathy Franklin, research director for Helsinki Watch. The authorities can add years to a convict’s sentence if he does not cooperate--making the sentence, in effect, perpetual.

Some Nations Use Exile

The Soviet Union also practices another age-old method of getting rid of people without killing them--exile. And quite a few other nations, including Turkey, Zaire, Chile, South Africa and Paraguay, employ internal exile--that is, requiring people to live in particular places within the country.

Deporting convicts to a lifetime of forced labor in remote areas--a widespread practice in colonial days--has all but been abandoned. But a few countries, including Mexico, still use penal colonies, authorities said. Mexico keeps about 800 felons who are serving fixed terms, and their families, on Islas Marias off its Pacific coast.

New frontiers remain a tempting place in which to put convicts. In the late 1970s, Canada, which was itself once considered by Britain for use as a penal colony, considered establishing “correctional communities” for long-term convicts and their families in the Arctic, but rejected the idea.