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The ACLU released a new
report this week examining the growing trend of judges
sentencing nonviolent offenders to life in prison without parole.
The ACLU found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the War on Drugs,
mandatory minimums, and “tough-on-crime” policies are to blame.

The report,
A Living Death: A Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenders,
profiles 110 of the 3,278 inmates currently serving their life
sentences for nonviolent crimes. Most of the offenders were
charged with crimes like possession of small amounts of drugs or
petty theft.

For instance, one inmate, Timothy Jackson, stole a $159 jacket,
which, combined with three other minor shoplifting charges, met the
threshold for Louisiana’s Four-Strikes law. Jackson received a
mandatory sentence of life without parole. Inmate Fate Vincent
Winslow is serving his life sentence for selling $10 worth of
marijuana to an undercover cop. Like Jackson, Winslow’s crime was
his fourth offense in Louisiana.

Another inmate’s story, that of Dicky Joe Jackson, is
reminiscent of the plight of Breaking
Bad protagonist Walter White. To pay for his
son’s $250,000 life-saving bone marrow transplant, Jackson started
transporting methamphetamine. Before long, however, he was caught
selling to an undercover officer. SWAT teams raided his family’s
home, and Jackson was thrown in federal prison. He is nearly twenty
years into his lifelong sentence.

In addition to the inmate profiles—which are a horribly
depressing, but worthwhile read—the report discovered several
interesting facts about life without parole (LWOP) in the US.

The Number of LWOP Sentences Has Been Growing For
Decades

Offenders serving life without parole, whether violent or not,
has been one of the most rapidly growing populations in the prison
system. According to the report: “The number of people sentenced to
LWOP quadrupled nationwide between 1992 and 2012, from 12,453 to
49,081.”

LWOP Is Due to the War on Drugs, Mandatory Minimums, and
Other “Tough on Crime” Policies

Nearly 80 percent of non-violent LWOP offenses are for drug
crimes. Among the cases the ACLU surveyed, 83 percent of offenders
were placed there because of mandatory minimums or three-strike
laws—in other words, the judges had no choice. As the ACLU
said:

The prevalence of LWOP sentences for nonviolent offenses is a
symptom of the relentless onslaught of more than four decades of
the War on Drugs and “tough-on crime” policies, which drove the
passage of unnecessarily harsh sentencing laws, including
three-strikes provisions…and mandatory minimum sentences.

There Are Racial Disparities

Like most aspects of the criminal justice system, there are
stark racial disparities in life without parole sentences.
Sixty-five percent of LWOP inmates are black, while in some states
the disparity is even higher. In Louisiana, 91 percent are black.
In the federal system, blacks are 20 times more likely to be
sentenced to LWOP than whites.

This Is A Uniquely American Problem

The US is part of the mere 20 percent of countries that even
offer LWOP sentences. And of those countries, the vast majority
“place stringent restrictions on where they can be issued and limit
their use to crimes of murder.” As a result, the US’s LWOP prison
population dwarfs that of other countries’. According to the
University of San Francisco’s report
on U.S. Sentencing Practices in a Global Context, the US’s LWOP
population is 51 times greater than Australia’s and 173 times
greater than England’s. 

The District Attorney’s office in Middlesex
County, Massachusetts ruled that no criminal charges should be
filed in the death of Alyssa Brame, who was arrested on January 12
for allegedly offering to perform a sex act of some kind for $40
and died of alcohol poisoning in a jail cell. The five (5!)
officers who were on the scene at her arrest claimed she did not
appear visibly overly
intoxicated, but by the time she was taken to the police station
she couldn’t walk on her own, and cops there debated whether she
was too drunk to be accused of offering sex for money.
Via the Lowell Sun:

As that debate continued, only detention attendant
Kevin Lombard asked whether someone should call an ambulance.

“Civilian Attendant Lombard did not feel that he was permitted to
contact 911 for medical assistance himself,” District Attorney
Marian Ryan wrote in the report.

The report says a sergeant told Lombard no. Another commander told
Lombard to simply “let her lay down.”

According to Ryan’s investigation, “police personnel determined
that this was another one of those occasions where Ms. Brame was
intoxicated and needed to sleep it off.”

The DA report found that putting an unconscious person in a
cell, as had been done to Brame, was against department policy, as
was not checking on her every thirty minutes. It had been nearly an
hour since police last checked on her when she was found dead. The
third policy violation had to do with the personnel dealing with
Brame not being CPR-certified.

The medical examiner ruled the death an accident, but noted it
may have been possible to save Brame’s life if there had been a
medical intervention earlier. The DA report says Brane, 31, had
been in police custody ten times before, nine of those while
intoxicated. It also mentioned police were aware the city hospital
believed they were sending too many intoxicated prisoners over.
It’s impossible to know whether Brane would have survived alcohol
poisoning absent her encounter with police, but being thrown in a
cage for making a harmless offer, in an environment where a
concerned person would feel they weren’t permitted to call 911 for
assistance, certainly didn’t help.

A police board of inquiry is now investigating the case.