There are currently more than 200,000 people nationwide serving life sentences.

Public narratives about incarceration often present an inaccurate picture of the prison population - leading many to believe that most incarcerated people are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses. These narratives often cite the War on Drugs as the prime reason for the United States’ high prison population. While the War on Drugs caused immense and disproportionate harm to communities of color, people of color are over-incarcerated for nearly every type of crime. More than ⅔ of people serving life sentences in the United States are Black or Brown (1 out of every 5 Black men in prison are serving life sentences), and people of color are more likely to receive long sentences while being less likely to ever be released from them. 

Across the country, prosecutors are more likely to charge people of color with crimes that carry heavier sentences; as the Sentencing Project specifies, federal prosecutors are “twice as likely to charge African Americans with offense that carry a mandatory minimum sentence than similarly situated whites.” Black defendants are held in pretrial custody for an average of 30 days (62%) longer than whites, and a recent study from the US Sentencing Commission found that Black men who commit the same crimes as white men receive federal sentences nearly 20% longer. In California, Black men are incarcerated at 10 times the rate of white men. 

These trends carry over into youth sentencing, too: Black children are 5x more likely than white youth to be incarcerated - a disparity that has only increased in the last 20 years. This isn’t because Black children are committing more crimes - they’re just perceived as more dangerous by law enforcement. 

Once in prison, “comparable in-prison conduct—a major determinant of parole decisions—may result in divergent prison disciplinary records for Blacks and Latinos versus whites.” (The New York Times). According to emerging research in California, Black parole applicants are nearly 3x less likely to receive a parole grant than their non-Black counterparts; white commissioners are the primary drivers of racial disparities in parole grant rate outcomes, granting parole to Black applicants less than any other racial group.

One of the biggest predictors of crime is age. A person's likelihood of committing violence significantly decreases as they age; for most people, that decrease begins in early to mid-20s. As The Sentencing Project writes, “to the extent that incarceration is imposed primarily for incapacitation, judges and policymakers should be cognizant that each successive year of incarceration is likely to produce diminishing returns for public safety.” In other words, we incarcerate people for decades longer than necessary. 

Lengthy and life sentences are the main driver behind our aging prison population, with the amount of incarcerated people over the age of 50 quintupling between 2000 and 2017. Aging individuals in the prison system are primary drivers of the skyrocketing costs of incarceration; in California, it costs taxpayers more than $90,000 each year to incarcerate a single person, and the California prison system now has an annual budget of $13.6 billion.

The United States is the world leader in incarceration. For decades, harmful policies and “tough on crime” politics have posited the criminal justice system as a primary way of preventing and addressing crime. The only lasting effect has been our accumulation of the world’s largest imprisoned population. 

The deterrent effects of long term sentencing have been well studied, and scholars have concluded that deterrence is primarily tied to certainty of punishment, rather than severity. In other words, the harshness of a possible sentence has very little impact on crime prevention; or, as The Sentencing Project writes, “increasingly punitive sentences add little to the deterrent effect of the criminal justice system”. If they did, the United States would be the safest country in the world. While the United States incarcerates more people than any nation on earth, The Peace Index of 2019 ranks us 128th in safety…out of 163 nations.

LWOP, or “Life Without Parole” sentencing has emerged as the forerunner for replacing the Death Penalty (which is still legal in 27 states). While life (and long term) sentences are marketed as a “moral” alternative to the Death Penalty, all one has to do is look at the end result to see that the two sentences are one and the same. For those serving LWOP, the only way home is through a complicated commutation process in which just a handful of people (out of thousands) succeed each year - there are no appeals and no additional legal avenues and protections. The majority of people serving LWOP sentences will die in prison.

Even for those without LWOP sentences, a prison sentence of any length can be a death sentence. The suicide rate in California prisons is over twice that of the state’s average for people on the outside. The COVID-19 pandemic has also shed new light on the severe health risks and public safety dangers of prison, where incarcerated people are disproportionately affected by a myriad of chronic health issues, and at heightened risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19 and other life threatening illnesses; in a recent lawsuit following the infamous COVID outbreak at San Quentin, in which more than two thirds of the entire prison population became infected, a Court of Appeal described the conditions at San Quentin as “cruel and unusual punishment,” and the “inevitable consequence of...deliberate indifference to the lives and wellbeing of many hundreds of people at San Quentin”. To date, 238 people have died from COVID-19 in California prisons, including 27 staff members.

Cycles of violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the criminalization of poverty and homelessness have turned our prison system into an “ouroboros”: a serpent eating its own tail. California has one of the highest recidivism rates (the rate at which formerly-incarcerated people return to prison) in the nation, with 65% of those released returning to prison within 3 years. Our system is fundamentally broken: people inside prison lack access to trauma-informed programming that could allow them to recognize and heal from life events that may have led to their incarceration, and upon their release, are further demonized and dehumanized by an elaborate set of legal and social hurdles that prevent them from finding jobs, safe and stable housing, and other necessities. 33% of all prison admissions nationwide are due to simple parole violations, not new crimes. Successful reentry to society is not the rule; it’s the exception.