Punishment beyond life: what a psychologist, philosopher, and judge learned about consecutive life sentences and the hidden rules of imaginary punishment
By Eyal Aharoni, Eddy Nahmias, and Morris Hoffman
2026
A judge, a philosopher, and a psychologist walk into a bar. Except this time, it’s not a joke. The three of us met to talk shop, when one of us said, “Did you hear about the judge who sentenced the mass murderer to 1,000 years in prison?” But this, too, was no joke. Sometimes the most serious offenders really do get sentences that are far longer than a human lifespan. In America, for example, Charles Scott Robinson was sentenced to 30,000 years for multiple aggravated rapes. And more recently, in Spain, Othman El Gnaoui was sentenced to 42,924 years for his role in a Madrid train bombing. After talking more about it, we realized that it wasn’t obvious at all why laws allow—and sometimes require—judges to order longer-than-life sentences, or whether and why citizens might support such laws. But we knew one thing: these longer-than-life sentences are not needed to deter or incapacitate the offender. One life sentence is enough for that. The beyond-life portion is imaginary in that it cannot be served. So are these imaginary years meaningful to people? And if so, what exactly do they mean?
To find out, we decided to conduct an experiment. We asked ordinary people to make punishment recommendations for a hypothetical 50-year-old man who qualified for two very long sentences for attempting to murder two children. Half of the respondents were told that, in their jurisdiction, when an offender qualifies for two sentences that together exceed a natural lifespan, those sentences are treated as consecutive, meaning that they are served one after the other. As a result, he’d have to live to the unlikely age of 110 before any chance of going free. The others were told that the two sentences must be treated as concurrent, meaning that they are served at the same time. As a result, he’d only have to live to age 60 to go free—a likely possibility. What we wanted to know is whether punishers in the consecutive, “longer-than-life” sentencing group would make use of the upper end of the sentencing scale even though the length of their sentence was completely inconsequential for the offender.
After making their initial sentencing recommendation, participants were given a chance to reconsider after hearing evidence of mitigating circumstances. If punishers are only concerned about deterring the offender, they would infer that these minor adjustments to the longer-than-life sentence are pointless, and will either reduce the sentence to the minimum, or perhaps take a more passive approach and leave their initial sentence where it was. But if these fictitious life years are somehow meaningful to people, they should take the bait and reduce the sentence, but only by the same percentage that they do for the concurrent group, when the offender really could get out in his lifetime.
That’s exactly what happened. Their pattern of punishment was indistinguishable from that of the concurrent group. Just like in ordinary sentences restricted to real life years, the people considering longer-than-life years recommended a very high initial punishment (ending around age 133), and then offered about a six-year reduction in response to the mitigating factors. So, in this scenario, the offender would still have to reach age 127 before being released. What’s more, this six-year reduction was essentially identical to the reduction amount offered by the other group of participants, namely, the ones who judged real life years (between ages 60 - 100). That group punished in an amount that would let the offender out around age 93 initially and age 87 after mitigation. So, although they seemed to show some compassion through this sentencing reduction, the people in the concurrent group clearly did not want to risk the offender getting out at a young enough age to reoffend. Our findings are published in Behavioral Sciences.
The next question is, why would the participants in the group using longer-than-life years show this pattern? A 127-year-old offender is no more dangerous than a 133-year-old offender. And release at age 127 is no more compassionate than a release at age 133. So, if their specific judgments make no difference for the offender’s actual time served, why bother with the mental math when they could have left their sentences alone and called it a day? The fact that they went through this effort implies that the specific punishment judgments they made are meaningful to them in some way, but what could they mean?
One reason people might cling to these imaginary punishments is that they are trying to send a message to the offender’s victims or to the broader community about just how seriously we take this kind of crime. In this case, perhaps punishers are trying to reinforce the norm that harming two victims is worse than harming just one. Using the sentencing scale seems like a convenient way to symbolize and advertise such social norms. But these explanations don’t completely solve the puzzle because they don’t explain why punishers, victims, and the broader community wouldn’t be equally satisfied by a message that symbolizes all the offender’s harms using a real (i.e., single) life sentence. After all, shouldn’t a single full-life sentence be enough of a deterrent?
To make sense of this puzzle, there is another possibility. One of the potential benefits of punishments, especially public ones, is that they provide a way for people in society to keep track of the various social credits and debits made by people in their network. Dead offenders cannot pay back their debts, but people don’t necessarily think through the issue that far. Over the course of human evolution, keeping tabs on others’ favors and debts through punishment would have improved cooperation and helped our ancestors maintain social standing. Instead of tracking all these credits and debits consciously and meticulously, as an accountant would, an efficient brain needs to be able to achieve its punishment goals rapidly and intuitively. So we may have evolved quick and dirty impulses to punish—sometimes a lot, and maybe other times too much.
Criminal punishment, at its best, serves communities in important ways, practically and morally. But criminal punishment, at its worst, can be like a bad joke. In the U.S., we punish more now than we ever have before, and with little to show for it in terms of crime reduction. About one-fifth of offenders are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, using taxpayer money that might have been useful to the community in other ways. We even dole out lengthy sentences for quadriplegics (Prendergast, 2011) and centenarians (The Associated Press, 2022). Our punishment intuitions can also be inconsistent and arbitrary, as offenders with similar case facts can receive disparate sentences or access to services. Our impulse for retribution is strong, but it doesn’t always guide us to our intended targets, as our study of “after life” sentencing reveals. By discovering the unconscious drivers of punishment judgments, we can reflect more carefully about when they are operating in service of our societal goals and when they are operating against them.