The US Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments on March 20 on two sentences of 14 years, about the constitutionality of life without parole sentences for juveniles. A previous court ruling had ruled it unconstitutional to impose a sentence of life without parole for juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses.
A new report from the Sentencing Project has come out today which provides valuable information about the experiences and personal histories of the people serving these sentences.
The Lives of Juvenile Lifers presents findings from the first-ever national survey of this population, a comprehensive look that offers new perspectives on people who committed crimes before the age of 18, and some as young as 13. More than 2,500 people are currently serving these sentences in the United States.
“Most juveniles serving life without parole sentences experienced trauma and neglect long before they engaged in their crimes,” stated Ashley Nellis, research analyst of The Sentencing Project and author of the report. “The findings from this survey do not excuse the crimes committed but they help explain them. With time, rehabilitation and maturity, some of these youth could one day safely re-enter society and contribute positively to their families and their communities.”
The general findings are that such juveniles suffer from high rates of physical abuse, and they were exposed to high levels of violence, both in their homes and their communities. Also, African-Americans constitute 43.4% of life without parole sentences for a murder with a white victim, nearly twice the rate at which they are arrested for such crimes, 23.7%.
“The Sentencing Project’s report on the lives of juvenile lifers adds a new layer of meaning to the question now coming before the United States Supreme Court,” stated Mark Osler, former federal prosecutor and law professor at the University of St. Thomas.
“Forty years ago, the case of Furman v. Georgia generated a dramatic focus on the racial and class dynamics of the death penalty, and the Supreme Court looked to those injustices in changing the course of American law,” he continued. “This report provides a haunting echo to that era in revealing the similarly disproportionate use of juvenile life without parole sentences against defendants who are black and defendants who are poor. These sad facts underscore the need to once again recognize the simple truth that children are different than adults, and that such brutal finality does not sit well on unfinished souls.”
According to Ashley Nellis, author of the report, they wanted to provide a sense of the lives these juveniles had lived outside of their crime, since so much focus is often on the crime itself. They believe that “they are more than just the worst mistake of their lives” and “it’s important to find out what else was going on in their lives before and after.”
“A lot of times persons serving long and life sentences are forbidden from participating in vocational rehabilitational programming,” Ms. Nellis reported.
She said that later, although some offenders do participate in work, there is a lot of idle time for them to simply sit around and do nothing. And when you are looking at lifers, you are looking at decades of wasted time.
She said that despite many of these obstacles, “many of them show a strong will to overcome the mistakes of their youth. We know that their misbehavior dissipates over time because we looked at their disciplinary actions over time.”
Overall, she argues, “As a society we’re off-track when it comes to the ways that we punish youth for their misdeed.”
“The way that the administration of justice used to go in our country for young people – that we used to account for these important differences between juveniles and adults,” she continued. “Anyone with juveniles and teens knows they’re not adults. As a society we felt strongly that kids were different from adults. We believed they were deserving of a separate system of justice and that’s precisely why we developed a separate juvenile justice system going back to the late 1800s.”
Over time, however, the sentiment of society has shifted and society has embraced more tough on crime approaches, that Ms. Nellis argues “offer no hope to the lives that can be changed.”
She argues that this approach is not working, both from the standpoint of the lives of these offenders, and also for public safety. On the contrary, she argues, their survey shows, “Many have grown, they have reformed, and they also deeply regret the actions of their youth.”
Mark Osler is a law professor and a former federal prosecutor in Detroit.
He said that Texas is what is called a double-mandatory state. A youth that is charged with a qualifying murder is automatically going to be transferred to adult status. And once convicted, there is a mandatory sentence to that crime of life without the possibility of parole.
He said this means “there is no point in that process where the juvenile status of the offender is actively considered.” He argues that laws like that create “a real patchwork in terms of where these sentences come out of.”
Mr. Osler said a number of things about the survey jumped out at him and were concerning.
He is concerned about the racial effect, which he says is “a reflection of a value that’s deeply troubling,” the differential value of victims by race reflected in the fact that those who killed a white victim served much longer terms than those who killed a black victim, under similar circumstances.
“That’s something that has deep troubling roots in American law,” he said. “When we have a sentence like juvenile life without parole that is used relatively sparingly in most places, we have to worry that it’s being use arbitrarily.”
He also argues that the science that is emerging suggests that we need to continue to look at juveniles differentially from adults. Science has shown that the brain of teenagers is still unformed.
“[The teenage brain] essentially is different from what adult brains are,” he continued. “Essentially that means if we’re making a judgment about a 14-year-old… we’re not looking at the same brain that’s going to emerge later.”
“That’s particularly troubling when we see the concentration of the use of this penalty against the least among us, that is, those who are in the most troubling circumstances,” he concluded.
Linda White is a retired college professor whose 26-year-old daughter was murdered 25 years ago by two 14-year-olds.
“I do want to say, at the time I probably would have been happy with a life without parole sentence had it been available,” she said. “But I am of a totally different opinion today.”
“Today I believe it is inherently cruel to sentence young people to a life without parole sentence with never any hope of rehabilitation or redemption,” she added.
It was fifteen years after the crime that she met with one of the boys, Gary, who murdered her daughter. It was a mediated dialogue that was sponsored by the State of Texas.
It was the process of restorative justice that allowed Linda White to heal. She found herself both amazed and extremely gratified at the depth of Gary’s remorse.
“Gary is typical of many of the juveniles that come into the system,” she said, “a victim himself of many kinds of abuse.” She added, “Someone who felt the majority of his life unloved and without value.”
A family of one of the other inmates that he met along way “took him into their hearts” and “showed him the kind of love that he had needed for a long time, which often happens when kids come to see that they have value and they are more than that one horrible thing they did.”
“Our relationship is about honoring my daughter Kathy,” she said. “He said at the end of our mediations, he would always be there to do whatever he could to let his life be open and above board and to be an honor to her.”
“He has done that, he’s been true to his word all these years later,” she added.
Mark Osler noted that during the 1990s, there was a notion of super-predators, “children who were going to be violent their entire life and there was no way for them to change.”
He said if we had taken the time to look at the science, “there really weren’t the factors to support the super-predator theory.” Instead, he sees that a large number of youths in vulnerable positions are manipulated by the adults around them and they were used in drug operations, “in part because they were easily replaced and expendable.”
“They were involved in murders,” he said, “but that’s certainly not an indication that they were unredeemable for the rest of their lives. Rather it reflected the fact that as juveniles, they were particularly prone to manipulation by adults.”
The question becomes, if you preclude life without parole, what is the preferred or optimal amount of time that an individual should serve for a crime committed as a juvenile?
Mark Osler argues that we need to create a system of meaningful review. He argues that this is a great opportunity to try to create a system and ponder “what second chance review should be about.”
He argues it should be a realistic opportunity for release, while at the same time taking into account the voices that need to be heard.
Mark Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, pointed out that “people sometimes forget that an opportunity for review, an opportunity for parole is no more, no less than that. It’s an opportunity for a professional body to make a determination about whether someone is ready and suitable for release.”
The American Law Review, he said, recommends there be a second look at this, after about ten years of imprisonment.
“It’s perhaps true that most youth would not be considered ready for release at that point, [but] it does indicate that they think that that’s a sufficient amount of time by which some youths could have changed sufficiently that they could be considered for that,” Mr. Mauer added.
For Mark Osler, “We have to cross that first threshold, which is get rid of the never – they will never be released. Once we make that decision as a society… that there are places that we should not say never because of the status of the offender as a juvenile, then there is going to have to be real attention paid to the question of how do we construct that second look.”
This is the first of a multiple part series that looks into the issue of life without parole for juveniles, as we approach that March 20 Supreme Court hearing.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
[quote]She argues that this approach is not working both from the standpoint of the lives of these offenders but also for public safety. On the contrary she argues their survey shows, “Many have grown, they have reformed, and they also deeply regret the actions of their youth.”[/quote]
Sounds good, but how can you be sure? Secondly, if juveniles that are incarcerated as adults are not going to get the kind of help they need in prison that would turn their lives around, then do we really want to turn them loose? Thirdly, even in juvie these youngsters often do not get the help they need. If you want to shorten sentences or offer more leniency to youth, then you need to make sure the services they will need to be rehabilitated are put in place…
“Sounds good, but how can you be sure?”
How can you ever be sure? I was reading an article about this guy who killed and ate his victim in Connecticut. In 2007, he was charged with assaulting his girlfriend in Yolo County and was placed on probation. You can never know for sure. All you can do is put in measures to evaluate people and programs to make sure they aren’t released to fail, which is why I believe our recidivism rate is so high.