This is just a personal opinion, but I don't think that anyone should be sentenced to a term in prison longer than 20 years. I should also say that I was/am th

This is just a personal opinion, but I don't think that anyone should be sentenced to a term in prison longer than 20 years. I should also say that I was/am the victim of a crime that, while I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about it here, would normally get someone the death penalty. The primary reason that I don't support the death penalty is that I don't think that the state can be trusted to kill people humanely. It took me years to come around to this, but I also believe that it isn't punishment. It's revenge. The reason that I don't support terms longer than 20 years is that, no matter how uncomfortable it is to think about it, its abuse is more horrifying than the crime. Our prison system is barbaric. Google "California prison gladiator" and tell me that Abu Ghraib was a bunch of bad apples. Prisons produce that kind of abuse systematically. No matter how bad a crime committed by a single individual is, an institution that that produces the outcomes like those that out prison system creates is worse. Where I'm from, the prison system has a legacy that is intrinsically tied up to the slavery of the pre-civil war era. Some southern states even have prisons on the grounds of former slave plantations. In fact one of the things that most american's don't know is that slavery is not prohibited by the constitution. The amendment that banned slavery left a clause in place for prison inmates. This is particularly grotesque because they are still counted for the purposes of determining representation in congress based on population. Also, prison guard unions aren't prohibited from lobbying state or federal government to pass longer sentences. Never mind for-profit prisons, even prisons run by government aren't free from commercial pressures to keep prisons full. I'm intimately aware of how horrible crime can be, but prisons do not stop crime.