Juvenile justice
“When I die, they’ll send me home”: youth sentenced to life without parole in California
Sentencing juvenile offenders to life without parole in California
Authors:
C. Back; E. Calvin
Publisher:
Human Rights Watch , 2007
This report conducted research in California on the sentencing of youth offenders to life without parole. This report paints a detailed picture of Californians serving life without parole for crimes committed as youth. It found that approximately 227 youth have been sentenced to live their whole lives in California’s prisons.
The report found that youth are sentenced to life without parole for a wide range of crimes and culpability, and that in 45 per cent of cases surveyed, youth who had been sentenced to life without parole had not actually committed the murder. Forty-five per cent of youth reported that they were held legally responsible for a murder committed by someone else. The report also found that California’s law as it stands now fails to take into consideration a person’s legal status as a child at the time of the crime.
The report draws attention to the fact that since 1990, when the California law permitted juveniles to be sentenced to life without parole for murder, advances in neuroscience have found that adolescents and young adults continue to develop in ways particularly relevant to assessing criminal behaviour and an individual’s ability to be rehabilitated. Much of the focus on this relatively new discovery has been on teenagers’ limited comprehension of risk and consequences, and the inability to act with adult-like volition. For most teens, risk-taking and criminal behaviour is fleeting; they cease with maturity. California’s sentencing of youth to life without parole allows no chance for a young person to change and to prove that change has occurred.
Finally the report found that public awareness about this issue has increased recently through newspaper and magazine articles and television coverage. It concludes by saying that with a significant number of the country’s juvenile life without parole cases in its prisons, California has the opportunity to help lead the nation by taking immediate steps to change this unnecessarily harsh sentencing law.
