Given that your prisons would be purely for punishment and excluding people from society, would you continue to imprison those that had committed crimes like shoplifting, fraud or drug possession?
Would you implement much longer sentences (e.g. 'life means life')?
Drug possession - probably not, it just fills up jails and each prisoner costs about 40K to keep, under the present system at least
fraud - the thing is, risk takers, career criminals etc, would run wild without the threat of prison, I know smart "nice" people who would commit wild fraud if they knew there would be no chance of prison
shoplifting - smackheads who could do with a cold turkey stretch in the kind of prison i described
I'd still allow library access and visits / phone calls, probably TVs too, I don't want them coming out drooling and shitting everywhere.
About life meaning life, erm, the only thing I take issue with is when people actually go after someone, stab them, the person dies and then the attacker gets 2 years for manslaughter. I suspect it happens more in certain places than others for political reasons I wont go into. Anyway it's shit and I'd get rid of that, if you actually attack someone with a knife and they die, you killed them, end of, murder should be the only possible charge, not manslaughter, unless you stabbed them in self defense. There would be at least 4 less murders each year under my system anyway, with the elimination of murder within prisons.
But, no I don't think every or many murderers need whole life tariffs, but I think people who have committed further murders inside under the current system do, as they obviously aren't changing and there has to be that threat over the head of normal "lifers", that they can't just kill someone and get their first release denied, they'll actually end up dying in solitary if they kill someone. Obviously my system would get rid of that problem anyway though. You would also have far less of a drugs problem, if any and bully characters would have their whole way of life fucked by having no one to abuse.