No End in Sight: America's Enduring Reliance on Life Imprisonment

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"Before America's era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it's 1.4 million, and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences - one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there people in prison serving any sentence in 1970."

Just Kids

When Stacey Torrance was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in a Philadelphia courtroom in 1988, the sentence seemed somewhat unusual. First of all, life in prison is typically reserved for perpetrators of violent crime. And while someone had been killed during the chain of events that landed Torrance in front of a judge, Torrance hadn’t planned or participated in the killing. Torrance had agreed to lure Alexander Porter, the brother of a friend, to an older acquaintance who planned to steal Porter’s keys and then burgle the home of Porter’s father. But instead of simply stealing Porter’s keys, the older acquaintance, along with an accomplice Torrance had never met, tied him up and threw him into the trunk of their car. Torrance, too, was tied up–something he had not agreed to. Torrance was then taken to his mother’s home and released. Porter was driven away and eventually killed by Torrance’s older acquaintances, who were later tried for first-degree murder and eventually sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

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Sentenced to a Slow Death

If this were happening in any other country, Americans would be aghast. A sentence of life in prison, without the possibility of parole, for trying to sell $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer? For sharing LSD at a Grateful Dead concert? For siphoning gas from a truck? The punishment is so extreme, so irrational, so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it defies explanation.

And yet this is happening every day in federal and state courts across the United States. Judges, bound by mandatory sentencing laws that they openly denounce, are sending people away for the rest of their lives for committing nonviolent drug and property crimes. In nearly 20 percent of cases, it was the person’s first offense. 

As of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving sentences of life without parole for such crimes, according to an extensive and astonishing report issued Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. And that number is conservative. It doesn’t include inmates serving sentences of, say, 350 years for a series of nonviolent drug sales. Nor does it include those in prison for crimes legally classified as “violent” even though they did not involve actual violence, like failing to report to a halfway house or trying to steal an unoccupied car.

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This is a New York Times editorial.  Tom

23 Petty Crimes That Have Landed People in Prison for Life Without Parole

As of last year, according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 3,200 people were serving life in prison without parole for non-violent crimes. A close examination of these cases by the ACLU reveals just how petty some of these offenses are. People got life for, among other things...

• Possessing a crack pipe
• Possessing a bottle cap containing a trace amount of heroin (too minute to be weighed)
• Having traces of cocaine in clothes pockets that were invisible to the naked eye but detected in lab tests
• Having a single crack rock at home
• Possessing 32 grams of marijuana (worth about $380 in California) with intent to distribute
• Passing out several grams of LSD at a Grateful Dead show
• Acting as a go-between in the sale of $10 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop
• Selling a single crack rock

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.Life Without Parole: A Different Death Penalty

If you were sentenced to life in prison with no chance of release, how long would you want to live? Would you want to live at all?

I think about these questions often. My clients, inmates on death row, think about them every day. In more than twenty years of representing prisoners facing execution, I’ve had several ask me to waive their appeals so they could hurry up and die. There are some who think any client who “volunteers”—that's our euphemism for giving up—is necessarily irrational. I don't share that view. To be sure, two of my clients who told me to waive their appeals were mentally ill, and I fought to keep them from volunteering to die. But the others were perfectly rational. They did not want to spend at least six years, maybe fifteen, appealing their sentences, only to ultimately be strapped to a gurney and injected with poison.

It’s easy for most people to see their decisions as unhinged. We don’t spend twenty-three hours a day in sixty-square-foot cells with no TV, limited access to radio, books or magazines, and no contact with other human beings (unless you count being escorted from point A to point B by often sadistic corrections officers). I’ve had clients who want me to fight for them, and then when we win and get their death sentence converted into life, end up telling me I’ve betrayed them.

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