When ex-NYPD officers Charles Schwarz and Justin Volpe can receive the same sentence for raping Abner Louima as for killing him, we have lost our perspective. As horrible as the crime was, we still need to think about civilized gradations in our punishments. Even Dante's Inferno had gradations. PNS associate editor Joe Loya is a California writer currently writing a memoir.

C'mon. Sure, they did wrong. But a life sentence?

Now that we know ex-NYPD Officers Justin Volpe and Charles Schwarz sodomized Abner Louima in the back of a police station, let's talk about how ludicrous it is that they could both receive a life sentence for their heinous crime.

For the record, let me say that I'm no police-hugger. After spending nine years in prison, in and out of police custody, I'm satisfied in my knowledge that cops and prison guards periodically abuse their authority and attack prisoners. Last year a man in the LA County jail was choked to death by a sheriff who said the inmate was not handcuffed. Now the Coroner and Sheriffs department admit that the man was indeed handcuffed when he died.

The other day I asked a childhood friend -- an ex-LAPD officer, now small town cop -- what he thought about Schwarz's and Volpe's torture of Mr. Louima. "They should have just kicked Louima in the groin, then cited him for resisting arrest. But, c'mon, you don't rape a man for punching you."

Schwarz and Volpe will forever be defined by the worst two minutes of their life. Every parole hearing will deal with them as if they have always raped men, and will always want to rape men. And, if they're ever released from prison they'll have to register with the local police as sex offenders.

The Federal sentencing guidelines allow for them to serve a life sentence. But when Schwarz and Volpe can receive the same sentence for raping Abner Louima as for killing him, then I say we have lost our perspective. As horrible as the crime was, we still need to think about civilized gradations in our punishments. Even Dante's Inferno had various levels.

In California, the "three-strike you're out" law blindly requires equal life sentences for baby killers or pizza thieves. One man shoplifted beers from a 7-Eleven and the only solution prosecutors could imagine was to take this man's freedom for the rest of his life.

Schwarz and Volpe did wrong. Bad, horrible, ugly, wrong. And they should be punished. But not for life. I recommend that twenty-five or thirty years in prison is plenty of punishment. Believe me, after surviving nine years of prison, I don't cavalierly wish imprisonment on my worst enemy. I'm not that sadistic.

And I've already heard the dismay and decry "25 years isn't enough!" That's when I bring up my imprisoned friends Jimmy and Andre who've both served over twenty years in prison for second degree murder -- and who've changed their lives as severely as I've changed mine.

At age 24, Jimmy was a heroin addict who accidentally killed a woman during a botched purse snatching. At age 18, Andre bashed a beer bottle against a man's temple during a drunken barroom brawl. The parole board still defines them as murderers, even though the crime occurred in one mad, brief moment in their youth.

I say that society's inability to see how Jimmy, Andre, Volpe, and Schwarz could be different men in 25 years speaks more about society's deficiency of imagination than it does about their deficiency of scruples.

When I first heard that Volpe pleaded guilty, I felt sorrow for him. I spoke out loud to his face on the TV screen, "You stupid boy, you had no idea what you were doing." And I wasn't talking about volition. Sure, he knew that he was trying to humiliate Abner Louima. But he had no clue how his decision would damage his family and friends.

I guarantee you that Schwarz and Volpe had no idea how bad a conscience can plague a man for years just because he initially lied to his parents about his involvement in a crime -- lying to protect them from the immense shame and sense of failure parents easily feel in these situations.

And ex-Officers Schwarz and Volpe didn't know how the parents and siblings also do time with the prisoner. Not literally, of course, but parents' imaginations will always turn to the prison when they worry about the condition of their incarcerated son.

Schwarz and Volpe don't know how their brothers and friends will slowly desert them over the years because they haven't a way to cope with the pain of visiting a lesser version of the man they once admired.

Like the two dumb ex-cops, we too are ignorant of the real implications of our cries for hard justice. Because we cannot comprehend the severity of a life sentence, how it murders a soul, we don't understand how there are occasions when the remedy is worse than the disease.

I'm not defending a cop; I'm defending the principle of redemption. I simply want to imply that in the future, all of us can be something that we do not yet recognize as possible.