How Long Was The Longest Prison Sentence?

When you’ve been real bad, they give you life in prison. When you’ve been real, real, bad, they might give you life in prison – and then some. And if you’ve been as bad as Ariel Castro, the infamous kidnapper responsible for the capture, rape, abuse, and detainment of three women over the course of many years, they give you life in prison plus 1000 years in prison, no parole. But is that the worst you can get in terms of prison sentences?

Not even a little bit. Compare Castro to some other notorious bag guys and life plus 1000 years seems like a walk in the park. Take, for example, Juan Corona – he was responsible for the murder of 25 migrant workers in the early 70’s; he received one life sentence for each of the lives he took. If you do the math on that, based on the average life expectancy of the time period, that’s 1,525 years.

It gets worse. Bobbie Joe Long of Florida had a huge collection of assaults, rapes, kidnappings, and murders under his belt before finally getting caught. When convicted, he was sentenced to a total of 2,305 years – that was for one five-year sentence, 28 life sentences (estimated based on prevailing life expectancy trends of the time), four 99-year sentences, and a death sentence. You can’t really count the death sentence, but let’s assume it adds quite a bit of weight to that 2,305 years.

In 1993, rapist and kidnapper Darron Anderson was convicted and sentenced to 2200 years in Oklahoma. His big mistake after that was trying to appeal – the court brought his total sentence up to 11,000 years after that. Luckily for Anderson, though, he managed to remove 500 of those years by appealing again.

In America, the official longest sentencing was granted to pedophile and rapist Charles Robinson in 1994, also in Oklahoma (apparently Oklahoma is home of the “infinite prison sentence”). He was convicted on six counts of raping a child, and each conviction gained him 5,000 years in the clink, for a total of 30,000 years.

But even 30,000 years seems to pale in comparison to a sentence handed down in Spain; in 1972, a mailman named Gabriel Garandos was convicted of failing to deliver a total of 42,768 pieces of mail. The state wanted to give Garanados 9 years apiece, which would have given him a total of 384,912 years behind bars. A fair compromise of 14 years was reached, saving the mailman quite a few lifetimes of jail.