Suppose you are a teenager who has committed a crime and a judge is about to sentence you to a very long prison term.
How long would the judge have to pass down a sentence for it to essentially look like a life sentence?
States have struggled with this problem over the last decade, following several US Supreme Court rulings thatThe automatic sentence of minors to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional,because children have a unique ability to grow and change and therefore deserve a second chance later on. This has forced courts and legislators to consider how many years the more than 2,000 current inmates across the country should be served.who were originally sentenced to life in prison without parole as minors.
This story is published in collaboration withquadro.
Take the case of Michael Felder in Philadelphia.He was originally sentenced to life in prison without parole for a fatal shooting he committed as a teenager over an argument during a basketball game. Following the Supreme Court rulings, Pennsylvania courts overturned his sentence, but later replaced it with "50 years to life". The rationale was that this was at least an individual punishment for him and not an automatic life sentence, which wouldn't necessarily span his entire life. The case is still on appeal.
Other states have found that imprisoning a minor for 25 years is equivalent to life in prison. Some put the number at 40 years. But a Louisiana court ruled that even a 70-year sentence does not equal life imprisonment. Another one in Florida said sowith a possible parole date in 2352-in more than three centuries- remains less than an automatic life behind bars.
"It's really a philosophical question," said Marsha Levick, legal director of the Juvenile Law Center, an advocacy group. "These are kids who went to prison before they graduated high school, who never got a chance to grow up, have relationships, have families, have careers. Getting released at 70, 80, 90 if they're really old? Chance in real life ?
The three historic decisions of the Supreme Court wereGraham v. Floridaem 2010,Miller x Alabama2012 tuMontgomery arrives in Louisianain 2016. They hadmodern neuroscience showing that teenagers are impulsive, risk-takers and easily influenced by peer pressure,all the traits that can lead them to commit crimes and who, because they are still maturing, are less likely to commit another crime when they grow up. For these reasons, the judges determined that they deserve a chance to reform and then be released back into their communities after being held for a significant period of time.
But after the verdicts, many prosecutors and judges across the country began handing out prisoners who received automatic life sentences simply single sentences of 100 years or more, essentially a life sentence by another name.
Several state legislatures began passing laws requiring juveniles sentenced to life imprisonment to at least be given the opportunity to have their sentences reviewed by a judge, probation board, or other body after a specified period of time; in other words, a hearing to see if yes, your behavior in prison was good and your progress towards a second chance was sufficient. But many said such a review could not take place until 40 years or more after a youth's sentence.
According to lawsuits and appeals filed in at least half a dozen states,Offering these young men parole was, in many cases, almost as insignificant as changing their life sentences to 100 years.Many probation officers and judges did cursory checks before returning them directly to prison.
In addition to the parole issue, some courts have turned to the idea of actuarial tables, using the expected life expectancy of minors to determine how long it would be fair to sentence them.
This kind of logic raised a whole new set of questions. Life expectancy for most American men is around 76 years, but it is 72 years for black men. (According to The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, blacks are 10 times more likely than whites to serve life sentences without parole as youths.) And for incarcerated men, who experience far more stress and less exercise , less nutrition and less medical care, life expectancy is even lower:Each year behind bars shortens your life by two years,some studies have found.
As Jill Pasquarella, an attorney for the Louisiana Center for Children's Rights put it: "For many of these kids, age 50 will mean coming out of the closet in a wheelchair or on a gurney. That can't have been what Justice Kennedy intended." he said, referring to two of the three Supreme Court decisions authored by then-Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
The next possible approach would be to adjust life expectancy estimates for demographic characteristics, for example, shorter prison sentences for black men in poor health than for healthy white women. But that raises the question of whether it would be unconstitutional to try people differently for the same crime just because of their race or sex.
In 2013, when the Iowa Supreme Court heard the case of a teenager convicted of second-degree murder and robbery, it said the number of years he has been in prison should not "detail the complexities" of genetic testing and the effects on health. . Precisely because young people often act impulsively and are therefore "less likely to be evidence of an irrevocably corrupt character," the court said, they should have a real chance at freedom long before they die.
The ruling also addressed the issue of "stacked" sentences, saying that just because the young man committed two crimes, the state should not add his sentences to the kind of life imprisonment that the Supreme Court found unconstitutional.
But other states have handled this problem differently, and it remains unresolved.
Meanwhile, other courts have proposed what juvenile attorneys believe is an equally unacceptable alternative: setting the parole age for minors at the time when people in the United States normally retire.
"But wait a second, people retire at age 65 after living full, productive, healthy lives, it's criticalanother lifeLevick said. "Actually, a long sentencemore extensivefor someone going to jail at 15 - who hasn't even lived an adult life - than for someone going to jail at 35”.
It is difficult to estimate how many youths are serving life sentences. In most states, no agency is responsible for counting how many children are rejected until they die, although child advocates in Louisiana, for example, estimate that there are more than 200 in that state's prisons alone.
Pennsylvania has made perhaps the most concerted effort to re-sentence and then send home a large number of prisoners originally sentenced to automatic life without parole, according to the Supreme Court's reasoning. More than 200 alumniThere, young subsistence workers have been laid off in recent years, particularly in the Philadelphia area.
One of them, Abd'Allah Lateef, was 17 when he and a 21-year-old acquaintance took part in an unarmed robbery in which the victim died weeks later. After three decades behind bars, Lateef was released in 2017 and is now 50 years old.
For Lateef, the real issue should not be to calculate a number of years that effectively equals life imprisonment. The question is why it is necessary to lock up children for decades, given how well they can be rehabilitated and what is known today.the probability that they will not commit more crimes.
"Just five or 10 years after my incarceration, I wasn't the rowdy kid who was willing to participate in a robbery," he said. “And I can assure you that prison officials say this is the case for most minors. We went from being problems in less than a decade to being pillars of prison society, advising the younger ones behind us.”
“Well, if I had to put a number, yes, it would be this: five years or 10 years. No more."