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FEBRUARY 8, 2016

The Meaning of Life Without Parole

BY CLINT SMITH

Does a life sentence without parole make sense when

prisoners who have committed violent crimes are no
longer a threat to society?
PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSE DEARING / THE BOSTON GLOBE / GETTY

I
t is the midpoint of autumn—the time of year
when winter begins to crawl its way onto your
skin—and night is beginning to fall as I arrive to
teach my writing class at a state prison in Massachusetts. On particularly windy evenings
like this, the tops of trees sway back and forth. The sounds of their fraying leaves wrestle
against one another like the bristles of an old broom along a wooden floor—its old, worn
edges bending and breaking as it moves across the room.

In a classroom on the second floor of this prison, sixteen men in faded blue and gray
jumpsuits await the start of class. Each window—on opposite sides of the room—
remains a few inches open, just enough to allow the breeze to somersault its way across
the room and out again. An enormous concrete wall, topped with barbed wire,
demarcates the perimeter of the facility. You are reminded that you are, in fact, inside of a
cage.

Here, at one of the state’s more rehabilitation-friendly institutions, there are ample
programs for the men to participate in, including sports leagues, a chess club, writing
classes, a ministry, and vocational courses. You may, in fact, find yourself forgetting the
limits of your freedom, even if just for a moment. But it is important to remind yourself
of this fallacy. To look around—at the guards, their black uniforms juxtaposed against the
gray halls they patrol, at the perches from which they watch everyone beneath them, at
the intercom that informs you when and where you are allowed to move—is to be
reminded that this is a space in which the state has made it policy to strip people of
agency over their bodies. A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a
cage.

Inside of this cage, countless men are serving life sentences without the possibility of
parole. They have, fundamentally, been sentenced to die in prison. For a number of them,
the sentences they are serving are for crimes that were committed when they were teen-
agers.

Near the end of January, the Supreme Court ruled, in Montgomery v. Louisiana
Near the end of January, the Supreme Court ruled, in Montgomery v. Louisiana
(http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-280_3204.pdf ), that those serving life
sentences for crimes committed as juveniles would have the opportunity to make the case
for a chance at a second hearing. This decision makes retroactive a 2012 ruling in Miller
v. Alabama, stating that life without the possibility of parole for juveniles is
unconstitutional. Among those who have been waiting anxiously on the Montgomery
decision is a student in my class whom I’ll call Neal.

Neal’s long beard protrudes from his chin and jawbone, patches of gray scattered
haphazardly across the small forest of tight black curls. His oversized sweatshirt and
sweatpants belie his rotund frame, and the incandescent light from above reflects off of
his cleanly shaven head. His glasses sit precariously on his nose, teetering on the edge of
his nostrils. The intonation in his voice connotes a question, even when he is not asking
one.

Today, when it is time for each of the men to share his work from the previous week,
Neal makes his way to the front of the class and places several pieces of loose-leaf paper
atop our makeshift lectern. He adjusts his glasses, and strokes the side of his beard as if to
convince his mouth to open. He looks around at each of us, looks down again, and begins
to share a story of his childhood. His youth, like many of ours, began with the sort of
innocence that shields us from fully absorbing all that transpires around us. Soon,
however, his father began to physically abuse him, his brother, and his mother. His
mother tried to find an escape through crack cocaine. She became emotionally, and often
physically, absent.

Despite an absent mother and abusive father, Neal did his best to hold on to some
semblance of a childhood, searching for friendship, mentorship, and guidance anywhere
he might find it. He did not find it in a school that failed to support him. He did not
find it in a family that had been ripped apart by violence. When he couldn’t find it
anywhere else, he fell into the world of gangs and drug dealing; they would look out for
him when no one else would. “Finding acceptance in the streets was clearly the wrong
choice, but I did what I thought was right at the time,” he said. “I saw more than any
eleven-year-old should ever have to experience.” Still in the midst of his teens, and in the
heat of a confrontation, Neal took someone’s life. He is now serving a life sentence
without the possibility of parole.

I
n the conversation around mass incarceration, the contemporary political discourse
often centers on the notion that if we simply release, or reduce the sentences of, all of
the nonviolent drug offenders, we will be able to solve the problem of our enormous
prison population. This is false. According to the latest Department of Justice statistics
(http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf ), only sixteen per cent of incarcerated
people in state prisons are serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Fifty-three per
cent are serving sentences for violent offenses, and about nineteen per cent for property

offenses, like burglary or larceny. “Even if every single nonviolent drug offender were
offenses, like burglary or larceny. “Even if every single nonviolent drug offender were
released tomorrow,” Gilad Edelman wrote last year,
(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-real-answer-to-mass-incarceration)
“the [U.S.] incarcerated population would stand at around 1.7 million—still nearly a fifth
of the world total.”

The much more difficult, and perhaps more necessary, question about incarceration is
what our efforts to reduce our prison population mean for people like Neal, those who
did indeed commit a violent crime and who are subsequently spending decades upon
decades behind bars.

Miller v. Alabama, and now Montgomery v. Louisiana, force us to reckon with this
question, but if we are in fact moving toward meaningful decarceration more must be
done. If the espoused mission of departments of correction is to “promote public safety
by managing offenders while providing care and appropriate programming in preparation
for successful reentry into the community”—as stated by the Massachusetts Department
of Corrections (http://www.mass.gov/eopss/agencies/doc/)—we must ask ourselves if
putting men and women who committed crimes when they were children, or even young
adults, in prison for the rest of their lives moves us toward that goal. Further, if the
purpose of incarceration is public safety, what does it mean to keep people in prison
when they are no longer a threat to society?

Although it was once assumed that adolescent development was complete by age
eighteen, emerging research demonstrates that the brain does not finish developing until
one’s mid-twenties (http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html), specifically
the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making, risk management, and impulse
control. Additionally, after a certain age, one’s likelihood of committing another violent
offense decreases dramatically. (http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/Pages/delinquency-to-
adult-offending.aspx) This is becoming increasingly relevant because, at present, about
ten per cent of incarcerated people are fifty-five
(https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/27/when-prisons-need-to-be-more-like-
nursing-homes#.l33i9vToV) or older, and by 2030, according to a report by the
A.C.L.U., that percentage will grow to a third of our prison population. This
demographic’s average likelihood of committing another crime is ever-diminishing.

As a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the law now states that people seventeen and
younger cannot be sentenced to life without parole, except in the rarest cases. But what
about those who committed crimes when they were eighteen? Twenty-one? Twenty-
three? Is someone who committed a crime at twenty-five the same person he or she is at
sixty-five? We must ask ourselves these questions because mass incarceration is not
merely the result of putting away too many people for nonviolent drug offenses; it is the
result of putting people who committed violent offenses away for longer than is necessary
to promote public safety.

Additionally, we must also contend with the fact that many of those who have been
Additionally, we must also contend with the fact that many of those who have been
imprisoned have, because of systemic disinvestment by the state, grown up in conditions
that facilitated their pathway to prison. It is easy to lob moral disapprobation when we
are not caught in the web of structural violence and intergenerational poverty ourselves.
As is the case with adolescence, poverty clouds judgment and restricts choices
(http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-brain-on-poverty-why-
poor-people-seem-to-make-bad-decisions/281780/). This is not meant to excuse, it is
meant to contextualize.

Neal’s story of abuse reflects how those who have witnessed or been on the receiving end
of physical violence are often those more likely to engage in violent behavior later in life.
His story of poverty and neglect reflects a diminished moral agency, as he grew up in an
environment that has been systemically stripped of resources as a matter of public policy
(http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-sanitize-how-our-
government-created-the-ghettos). In a study by Harvard sociologist Bruce Western, forty
per cent of the recently incarcerated men and women interviewed in the Boston area had
witnessed a killing during their childhood
(http://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2015.1.2.02). So, beyond rationally
responding to one’s social context, sometimes the very notion of what is rational,
particularly for young people who grow up surrounded by violence, becomes much more
complicated. What is choice when in the midst of ubiquitous trauma? What is agency
when you have been dispossessed of your innocence?

One might contend, and quite legitimately, that someone who has been murdered by
another person will never have the opportunity to grow, heal, or change. This opportunity
has been taken away from the victim, thus it should also be taken away from their
murderers. The place from which this sentiment arises is certainly understandable. But, as
a matter of public policy, we should ask whether or not we want to be the type of country
that allows people who demonstrate no legitimate threat to public safety the opportunity
to move beyond what they have previously done.

Neal does not pretend that he has done nothing wrong; in fact, over twenty years have
passed, and remorse for his crime is an ever-present part of life. He speaks and writes
often of the victim’s family, how he cannot imagine what he has put them through. He
has spent his entire tenure behind bars participating in education programs, cognitive-
thinking programs, drug rehabilitation, and P.T.S.D. treatment. “I’m not the same person
I was before,” he says. If released, Neal says that his mission is to work to insure that
young people do not get caught in the same web of drugs and violence that led him here.

Neal is also deeply cognizant of the way that the broader world perceives him. He knows
that his story is all too familiar to many, but that he and many of the men in the prison
alongside him have undergone a process of fundamental rehabilitation, and are prepared
to meaningfully contribute to society again.

In his opinion on Montgomery v. Louisiana, Justice Kennedy wrote, “Prisoners like

In his opinion on Montgomery v. Louisiana, Justice Kennedy wrote, “Prisoners like
Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect
irreparable corruption; and, if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison
walls must be restored.” The question is not if Mr. Montgomery, Neal, or others like
them should be excused for the crimes they committed. The question is whether it makes
good public policy—does it make us safer and align with our espoused notions of justice
—to keep aging men and women in prison until the day they die?

When I leave the prison, I button my coat and secure my scarf. The wind is especially
strong. The trees move from side to side, not by their branches, but from the core of their
trunks. I know that but for the arbitrary nature of circumstance, it could have been me
sitting for decades inside of prison, rather than walking away from one. It is easy to
singularly define people by the worst thing that they have ever done, but it becomes more
difficult to imagine what we would want the world to do if it were us.

Clint Smith is a teacher, writer, and Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University.