In the American criminal legal system, there is a troubling disconnect between what we know about people and what we choose to do with them. A person can commit a crime as a teenager, be sentenced to life without parole, and die behind bars decades later—even though they long ago stopped posing any threat to public safety.
This isn’t an accident but deliberate policy. And it’s a policy built on the flawed assumption that people never change.
In truth, most people do change. One of the most well-established principles in criminology is that people tend to “age out” of crime. The vast majority of offenses are committed by young people in their teens and early twenties.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly three-quarters of all arrests are of people under 40, while fewer than 4% are of people aged 60 or older. That drop-off is even more dramatic for violent crime.
A study published in the Notre Dame Law Review found that, among people released from prison after serving time for violent crimes, only 1% of those aged 55 or older were reincarcerated for a new offense within three years.
This natural desistance is backed by biology. The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, long-term planning, and moral reasoning—doesn’t fully develop until a person’s mid-20s. Young people are more likely to act recklessly, respond to peer pressure, and fail to anticipate consequences.
As people mature, they become more stable, more reflective, and more risk-averse. These developmental insights have driven changes in juvenile sentencing, but they rarely inform adult punishment—even though aging doesn’t stop at 18.
In The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences, Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis argue that “[t]he United States is far past the point of diminishing returns for public safety, as lifers age in prison.”
They note that while life sentences are often justified in the name of public protection, “the scale of that effect is far more modest than commonly believed” and that “a growing body of research shows that long sentences are an ineffective and unnecessarily punitive response to crime.”
What’s more, the U.S. imposes life sentences on a staggering scale—more than 200,000 people are serving life terms, a number that exceeds the entire prison population of the U.S. in 1972.
A recent report from Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), The Older You Get: Why Incarcerating the Elderly Makes Us Less Safe, reinforces this point. The report reveals that recidivism rates decline sharply with age and that even those convicted of violent offenses are extremely unlikely to reoffend later in life.
For example, in Philadelphia, 174 people originally sentenced to life without parole for homicides committed as juveniles were released. After more than a year and a half on average in the community, only 1.1% had been reconvicted of any offense.
In Maryland, among 188 people released after serving over 30 years—many for murder or rape—only five (2.7%) were returned to prison over the following six years.
These outcomes should prompt serious reflection: If people are statistically unlikely to reoffend after decades in prison, what exactly are we accomplishing by keeping them locked up? The cost is not just moral. It’s financial.
Elderly incarcerated individuals cost taxpayers three to nine times more than younger people due to age-related medical care. In many cases, we are paying exorbitant sums to incarcerate people who no longer pose any risk—simply to satisfy outdated sentencing laws and a cultural thirst for retribution.
These policies are not inevitable. They are the result of deliberate political choices—like “three strikes” laws, habitual offender enhancements, and parole board practices that treat release as a privilege rather than a presumption.
Mauer and Nellis highlight that “[p]olicy choices, not criminal offending patterns, have produced the dramatic expansion in both the number of people serving life imprisonment and the years they must serve before being considered for release.”
Some people are sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent drug crimes. Others receive “virtual life” terms of 50 years or more. And racial disparities remain deeply entrenched: two-thirds of those serving life sentences are people of color.
This is not how most democracies operate. Norway abolished life imprisonment in 1981, declaring it incompatible with human dignity. In Latin America, only a handful of countries permit life sentences at all. Even in the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that indefinite imprisonment without hope of release is inhumane.
The U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged that “death is different,” requiring heightened scrutiny for capital punishment.
But life sentences often carry the same finality without the same safeguards. As Mauer and Nellis point out, “If this is how punishment is carried out with enhanced layers of scrutiny [in death cases], one can only imagine the miscarriages of justice that take place for individuals serving life sentences.”
Reform is both possible and urgent. Advocates and lawmakers have proposed second-look sentencing, mid-course sentence reviews, and presumptions of parole eligibility after a certain number of years served—often 15 or 20. These reforms would not guarantee release, but they would guarantee a chance to demonstrate rehabilitation and current fitness to reenter society.
The American Bar Association has long recommended that criminal penalties “should be no more severe than necessary to achieve the societal purposes for which they are authorized.”
That principle is routinely violated in our current system.
Some will argue that long sentences are necessary for deterrence. But the research does not support that claim. Studies consistently show that it is the certainty of punishment—not its severity—that deters crime. Many people who commit crimes never believe they’ll be caught. For others, the act is impulsive, intoxicated, or born of desperation.
They are not weighing whether the sentence will be 10 years or 50. And even if they were, decades of data show that longer sentences do not meaningfully improve public safety outcomes.
At some point, justice must be forward-looking.
It must ask whether the person standing before us today—not the person they were 30 or 40 years ago—is a danger to others or capable of living peacefully in the community. The answer, in most cases, is yes. If we truly believe in rehabilitation, we must build a system that recognizes it when it happens—and makes room for redemption.
From article: “And it’s a policy built on the flawed assumption that people never change.”
It’s a policy based upon “punishment” and “retribution”. Pretty sure that people aren’t generally afraid of those over the age of perhaps 60 or so, though there are exceptions.
I’m not sure if “punishment” and “retribution” are good-enough reasons to keep most people locked up indefinitely, as they age. The financial cost alone of doing so is probably “not worth it”, though I suspect that most people released from prison continue to generate costs for society – one way or another.
“It’s a policy based upon “punishment” and “retribution”. Pretty sure that people aren’t generally afraid of those over the age of perhaps 60 or so, though there are exceptions.”
If that’s the case, why are you holding people who are statistically unlikely to commit offenses? A lot of countries top sentences at 20 years for that very reason
Me? I’m not “holding” anyone. You can even check my attic, if you’d like. Though there could be some rats up there, who will soon be exiting as the weather increasingly heats-up.
The murderer of Jen Angel’s sentence (7 years) wasn’t ‘too long’