Harrisburg, Pa. – Just a few decades ago, a life sentence was often a misnomer, a way to suggest harsh punishment but deliver only 10 to 20 years.
But now, driven by tougher laws and political pressure from governors and parole boards, thousands of lifers are going into prisons each year, and in many states only a few are ever coming out, even in cases where judges and prosecutors did not intend to put them away forever.
Indeed, in just the last 30 years, the United States has created something never before seen in its history and unheard of around the globe: a booming population of prisoners whose only way out of prison is likely to be inside a coffin.
A survey by The New York Times found that about 132,000 of the nation’s prisoners, or almost 1 in 10, are serving life sentences.
The number of lifers has almost doubled in the past decade, far outpacing the overall growth in the prison population.
Of those lifers sentenced between 1988 and 2001, about a third are serving time for sentences other than murder, including burglary and drug crimes.
Growth has been especially sharp among lifers with the words “without parole” appended to their sentences.
In 1993, the Times survey found, about 20 percent of all lifers had no chance of parole. Last year, the number had risen to 28 percent.
The phenomenon is in some ways an artifact of the death penalty.
Opponents of capital punishment have promoted life sentences as an alternative to execution.
And as the nation’s enthusiasm for the death penalty wanes amid restrictive Supreme Court rulings and a spate of death row exonerations, more states are turning to life sentences.
Defendants facing a potential death sentence often plead to life; those who go to trial and are convicted are sentenced to life about half the time by juries that are sometimes swayed by the lingering possibility of innocence.
As a result the United States is now housing a large and permanent population of prisoners who will die of old age behind bars. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, for instance, more than 3,000 of the 5,100 prisoners are serving life without parole, and most of the rest are serving sentences so long that they cannot be completed in a typical lifetime.
Prison wardens, criminologists and groups that study sentencing say the growing reliance on life terms also raises a host of questions.
Permanent incarceration may be the fitting punishment for murder. Few shed tears for Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, who was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms in Washington state, one for each of the women he admitted to killing.
But some critics of life sentences say they are overused, pointing to people like Jerald Sanders, who is serving a life sentence in Alabama. He was a small-time burglar and had never been convicted of a violent crime.
Under the state’s habitual offender law, he was sent away after stealing a $60 bicycle.
Fewer than two-thirds of the 70,000 people sentenced to life from 1988 to 2001 are in for murder, the Times analysis found.
Other lifers – more than 25,000 of them – were convicted of crimes like rape, kidnapping, armed robbery, assault, extortion, burglary and arson. People convicted of drug trafficking account for 16 percent of all lifers.
Life sentences certainly keep criminals off the streets. But, as decades pass and prisoners grow more mature and less violent, does the cost of keeping them locked up justify what may be a diminishing benefit in public safety?
By a conservative estimate, it costs $3 billion a year to house America’s lifers. And as prisoners age, their medical care can become very expensive.