Jaycee Dugard and US sentencing policies that don't add up

The question has been asked here before and I ask it again.

How, as an educated and highly intelligent individual, do you keep a straight face when uttering words along these lines: "It is the sentence of the court that you will go to prison for 431 years."? Unless, of course, you are passing sentence on an inanimate object.

Now I am quite sure Judge Douglas C Phimister, who imposed that penalty on a human being with no known powers of immortality at El Dorado County Superior Court yesterday, is a wise man with an impressive legal mind.

For all I know, he may even share my disdain for the notion of passing a prison sentence of nearly 28 times the life expectancy of the defendant, based on the national rate I have just looked up. It may be that his hands are tied.

But there it is, enshrined in whatever legislation or sentencing guidelines the judge was following when the time came to deal with a thoroughly nasty piece of work by the name of Phillip Garrido: 431 years, if the reports I have read are correct, is the maximum sentence for what he did to Jaycee Dugard, kidnapped at the age of 11 and held captive for 18 years. And was duly passed.

I am sorry, but this strikes me as being intellectually absurd. And the fact that some reports refer to the term as "431 years to life" merely confirms the impression that we are dealing here with Mickey Mouse judicial practice.

For what he did, Garrido amply merited the severe but intellectually sound sentence of life imprisonment with no prospect of release. I oppose the death penalty and believe life, without parole, is a punishment that should be used very sparingly since it is designed to crush the individual and I am, in general, against the idea of the state taking it upon itself to do such a thing.

But yes, if anyone deserved it, Garrido did; my quarrels with the harshness of US penal policy have no place in the discussion of this case.

So why cannot US law or US judges be content with that? Why is it necessary to stipulate an entirely unservable period of incarceration, whether that be 150 years (Bernard Madoff) or 431?

The argument has been advanced here that sentences of hundreds of years send out a strong message. But precisely the same meaning is conveyed by a form of words that provides for detention for the rest of a convict's natural life. I can see no point in a message that relies for its strength on mathematical and physiological nonsense.