The New Descriptive Mathematics

Friday, June 12, 2009

Guilty verdict restored in Virk slaying

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/649830

This is not about the death penalty, it is about language.

Read the last paragraph:

“He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for seven years and has since been released.”

To my mind this is either bad mathematics or bad writing. Or bad logic. Take your pick. You can’t have it both ways.

“Life in prison” means, and can be taken to mean “To the end of the prisoner’s life”. Barring the obviously potentially short life of a prisoner found guilty of raping the four-year old daughter of a police or prison officer, incarcerated in a medium-size city prison, whose life expectancy might be measured in days, we anticipate “life” here to mean “a standard expectancy”. If the prisoner is 20 years old, we think in terms of another 50 years. If the prisoner is 50 years old, we think in terms of another 20.

At any event, we think of a life that will come to an end on an undetermined day. And in that sense “life” means “an unknown (or unspecified) number of years”.

“No chance of parole for seven years” indicates that after seven years there exists a chance of parole. So that “Life in prison” no longer means “In prison until the end of their natural life”, but “seven years in prison, and after that, a chance of living the remainder of their life outside of prison. That is not Life In Prison. It is Part-life in prison, and ought to be labeled as such (perhaps with a better phrase).

“… and has since been released.” For what it is worth, we are being led to believe that after seven years was up, parole was applied. But the truth is that in this article that is not stated.

It is, of course, quite possible that the prisoner was released ahead of the seven-year limit, perhaps after only five months. But we are not to know that. We are shown a shimmering image of something else.

This is just not clear writing, let alone clear thinking.

And it isn’t Life.

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