Talk:Indefinite imprisonment

Canadian law

In Canada to be held in indefinite imprisonment one needs to be declared a dangerous offender. Therefore added the link to Dangerous_offender when the word is used in the section on Canada and also added at the head of the section on Canada

Question: In Canada being held on a Security_certificate can also lead to indefinite imprisonment. Is it appropriate to add it or is it to POV? It's been a while since I've been writing here.Marcie (talk) 19:07, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sweden also has this. If you are sentenced to life imprisonment in sweden, the prisoner will remain in jail until they find him to be rehabilitated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.55.112.117 (talk) 11:25, 13 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Indefinite imprisonment for sex offenders in the USA

Here is a source I found:

"#tellusatoday: Indefinite sentences for sex offenders fair?." (Opinion) USA Today. March 22, 2012.

WhisperToMe (talk) 15:58, 15 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I propose that we split off indeterminate sentencing into its own article

It seems like there was a separate indeterminate sentencing movement in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1970s, which evolved separately from the British indefinite imprisonment phenomenon. The arguments for indeterminate sentencing were that prisoners should have a chance to reform and be released, as opposed to being subjected to vengeful retribution. The argument for the British system is that some prisoners are too dangerous to release. Thus one is focused on rehabilitation, while the other is focused on protection of the public, which are two different penological goals. Blackleaves (talk) 04:04, 26 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Today's usage of the term "indeterminate sentence" covers only sentences shown in the sentencing guidelines, which have minimum periods that must be served in prison.--Libracarol (talk) 20:24, 2 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. It seems to me that there is confusion arising out of equating "indefinite imprisonment" with "indeterminate imprisonment". The lead of this article contains, "It was imposed by certain nations in the past, before the drafting of the United Nations Convention against Torture (CAT)," but according to the Lead in Article Life imprisonment in the United States, "The laws in the United States categorize life sentences as "determinate life sentences" or "indeterminate life sentences," the latter indicating the possibility of an abridged sentence, usually through the process of parole."

Therefore (assuming the latter to be accurate) it is clearly not true that indeterminate sentences are a thing of the past in the USA. And, further, from Imprisonment for public protection it is also clear that, despite the abolition of new imprisonments for public protection in the UK in 2012, some prisoners remain in custody on these indeterminate sentences.

Also, the implication of the lead here is that custodial sentences imposed without a specified length of time are somehow almost in the realm of the "cruell and unusuall punishments", forbidden in the 1688 English Bill of Rights (subsequently mirrored in the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution over a century later). But it is clear from the tenor of Life imprisonment in the United States that, far from being a means of wreaking excessive revenge upon the prisoner for his felony, the imposition of an indeterminate [life] sentence, at least in the USA, is a means of providing conditional relief from further punishment, given 'good behaviour' whilst imprisoned.

Since I am no subject expert on this, I cannot opine usefully on whether this confusion arises from different official usage in the registers of different jurisdictions, but it does seem to me that, despite the similarity in the effect of these two categories of sentence, there appears - just from what is written in diverse articles in Wikipedia - to be a dissimilarity in the intent behind them, and thus, here, a distinction would be more helpful than the conflation of these two terms created by the definition at the head of the lead in this article, even if it were necessary to bring out the similarities and overlap in meaning of the two terms in the body of the two resultant articles. Hedles (talk) 09:56, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

‘Unconstitutional’ section in lead paragraph

It makes no sense to say that these sentences are now unconstitutional particularly in the United States. They may well be unconstitutional in the United States, but the implication is that they are in violation of all constitutions, with the constitution of the US just being more severe than other. It should be changed Xx78900 (talk) 08:59, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]