Doctoral Dissertation Research: Life Without Parole: Emergence of a Late 20th Century American Punishment

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) -- an extreme prison sentence under which a person convicted of a criminal offense is ineligible for administrative release during natural life -- has emerged as a routine legal sanction and penal practice in the United States. Yet while LWOP is a normal and expanding part of American punishment, just how it came to be so has not been carefully articulated or explained. This project investigates LWOP's rise and continued expansion along several lines. First, the project examines historical uses of life sentencing in America as a means of identifying how LWOP is unique. Second, the project analyzes LWOP's current use, charting patterns in session laws and sentencing statistics across the fifty states and the federal system. Third, the project uses comparative state-level case studies to interrogate existing hypotheses that attribute LWOP's emergence to death penalty abolition efforts or mass incarceration policies: drawing from legislative history, judicial precedent, executive records, media coverage, and archival material, the project explores the state-level conditions and decisions responsible for differences in the sanction's timing, target, and intensity.