Self-Mutilating Prisoners

Prison is obviously supposed to be horrible, we can all agree on that. You have almost no rights, certainly no privileges, and no escape. Some people might consider dying as a better option than to continue living in the can. The only thing is, if you’re a prisoner in Louisiana and you inflict any harm to yourself you have to stay for another two years. Wait…what? This only sounds weird because, well, it is.

You’d think that the main reason a prisoner would hurt himself is because they are in jail. So the apparent course of action to stop that is to stick him in jail for longer, right? Duh, why didn’t I think of that? Actually, if you think about it, people in prison really don’t have anything left to lose so how is extending their sentence going to sway them?

This does leave me with one issue that isn’t addressed in the law. What do they do to prisoners who are in for life?