Sentences of life without parole are often erroneously believed to translate to a handful of years in prison followed by inevitable release. The reality is that a life without parole sentence means that the individual will die in prison.
One’s home life in childhood shapes perceptions of the world and provides
instruction on right and wrong. Children model what they see in their immediate environment and when they experience trauma it has lasting effects on their perceptions and actions. Mass incarceration has had a profound impact on communities of color, especially African American communities. African American children are more than six times as likely as white children to have had a parent imprisoned.
instruction on right and wrong. Children model what they see in their immediate environment and when they experience trauma it has lasting effects on their perceptions and actions. Mass incarceration has had a profound impact on communities of color, especially African American communities. African American children are more than six times as likely as white children to have had a parent imprisoned.
When one or both parents are removed from the home due to incarceration, this leaves the children to be raised with another relative, a child welfare agency or even on the streets. Parental incarceration is often associated with emotional and behavioral problems among their children, including elevated aggression, violence, defiance, cognitive and developmental delays, and extreme antisocial behavior. Children of incarcerated parents are also more likely to drop out of school, become delinquent, and subsequently become confined in institutions themselves.
How is it, you can be put in an extremely difficult situation, which you have no experience in and be expected to make adult decisions, when you really don’t understand consequences? [And] then be considered an adult when you have never taken care of yourself or had adult responsibilities? Juvenile Lifer, Illinois
Adjusting to prison is difficult. Inmates often feel they have to establish a sense of toughness and resiliency to secure their safety. Combine this with the fact that this population entered prison as teenagers, surrounded by inmates several years older, and it is not unreasonable to expect that it would take a few years for young inmates to adjust to their new environment. In addition, young people frequently require more reminders about rules than adults in all contexts and the prison environment is no exception.
While there is often a perception that inmate behavior is dominated by violence and manipulation, in reality, many long-sentenced inmates such as lifers become positively engaged in their environment. Ethnographic accounts from lifers show that they view prison as their home, “…an involuntary one, to be sure — but still a domestic world in which they have an investment; they care about such things as the level of cleanliness, the quality of the food, the variety of activities, and even relations with their keepers.”
This man made some terrible mistakes as a fifteen-year-old in 1993. He was then sentenced to life in prison and began serving his sentence in 1995…I find [him] to be an intelligent, thoughtful, self-aware individual who has worked exceedingly hard to turn his life around. He has educated himself in a wide variety of subjects, including a great interest in spiritual matters. He’s a poet and has written some very good prison poetry. Through his poetry, I have discovered the extent of [his] knowledge of himself, his sensitivity, his determination to remain balanced in a situation often filled with chaos. I’ve also seen his despair and fear of dying in prison, never having achieved any of life’s goals that all young men think and dream about. He no more belongs in prison than I do. Mentor of Juvenile Lifer, Florida
The use of life-without-parole sentences for our nation’s youth violates the principles that first shaped our protected treatment of juvenile offenders, a hallmark of the American justice system for over a century. Today, the United States continues to sentence juveniles to life without parole while the rest of the world has rejected this practice. Through JLWOP courts have discarded unprecedented numbers of young, redeemable lives. We arrived at this accepted practice through a series of mistaken beliefs and misguided policies about youth’s culpability; these have landed teenagers in adult criminal court, thus subjecting them—and, in some cases, mandating them–to LWOP. The Supreme Court is now reviewing the appropriateness of treating juveniles as if they were adults in a number of criminal matters and has thus far consistently concluded that youth are quite different than adults in their maturity, responsibility, and capability for reform. Deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors even as it upholds the civil order!
Treating juveniles as if they were adults in criminal matters has proven to be a failure for public safety. There is now a growing body of evidence that has emerged on the array of problems associated with this practice. Many state policymakers are beginning to reconsider transfer policies and are shifting youth back to the juvenile courts where they were previously handled. Mississippi, Connecticut, and Illinois have all enacted legislation in the past several years that limits the ability to transfer juveniles to the adult system.
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| Lifers |
Life-sentenced inmates will grow old in prison and eventually die, but before they do, they will require substantially greater health care and medical services. Thus, life sentences add to the rising geriatric prison population and place heavy financial burdens on states. The average cost of incarcerating a person is $22,000 annually. A life sentence that begins in one’s late teens can be expected to last at least 55 years. But with rising costs of older inmates, beginning at age 55, the annual cost is closer to $65,000,54 yielding a lifetime cost to taxpayers of $2 million per prisoner. Most state departments of corrections report spending over 10% of their annual budget on the health care and housing needs of elderly prisoners.
The seriousness of the crimes committed by these individuals cannot be dismissed. All juvenile lifers were convicted of serious crimes and usually a life has been lost. Family members of victims have had a terrible injustice done to them and their lives are forever changed. There is little support for victims in the criminal justice system in terms of healing from the loss and compensating for the harms done; surviving family members are frequently left out of the justice process despite how intimately they are involved in the offense that occurred.
Public safety is compromised when at-risk youth are not provided with adequate, evidence-based, early intervention and violence prevention programming. As a society we can invest early in the lives of high-risk youth to provide skills and support and thus alter the pathways that lead to crime. Waiting until a young person commits a serious violent crime before positively intervening in his or her life is both cruel and misguided.
Eliminating juvenile life without parole would not result in serious, violent offenders escaping punishment. Instead, this would involve adoption of punishments proportionate to the crime while considering an offender’s age, maturity, and capacity for personal transformation through rehabilitation. The imposition of sentences that deny any hope for release contradicts what we know about young people’s potential for change. There is a wide gap between the view that some youthful offenders deserve stiff punishment and the perspective that no juvenile, under any circumstance, should ever be afforded the opportunity to seek release from imprisonment.
Instead of spending scarce resources on warehousing lives that could be transformed, we could be spending money more wisely, helping victims, and improving public safety. The nonpartisan American Law Institute recommends a “second look” after 10 years of imprisonment for life-sentenced youth. 59 Notwithstanding the probability that most prisoners would not be granted release after only 10 years, if even one eligible inmate was determined to be ready for release upon this “second look,” this could save a typical state $1.8 million in needless incarceration. The money saved could instead be directed at prevention and intervention programs that have a strong evidence-base in lowering crime: preschool programs, parenting skills development, multi-systemic therapy, vocational training, substance abuse treatment, and a host of other effective interventions that would reduce crime and repair families and communities from damage associated with violence.
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Peace and Love
TLW, Editor
LifePlusUs@gmail.com
