Felipe Calderón, who missed that column, is calling for a life sentence in some cases of kidnapping. Kidnappers who are police or ex-police, who abduct children, or who torture or murder the victim will face life in prison if a piece of legislation that Calderón is sending to Congress today is passed. Mexican society's frustration with kidnappers seems to have boiled over with the murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, whose killers certainly deserve a harsher penalty than a liberal society has to offer, but if the goal is reduce the number of abductions, this isn't the proper approach. Impunity is the problem, not the severity of sentences. If kidnappers knew that they had a 98 percent chance of getting caught and spending eight years in prison, there probably wouldn't be a whole lot of them. However, if they had just a 2 percent chance of spending the rest of their lives in prison, but the rest got off scot free, that's not much of a deterrent.
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