A national study offered details on the juvenile lifer population and revealed disparities between states in their resentencing and release rates of minors.

The recent open-access study, published in the Journal of Criminal Justice, is part of a three-year research project funded by a grant from the philanthropy foundation Arnold Ventures. The grant was awarded to Laura Abrams, a social welfare professor.

The study collected data on over 2,900 juvenile lifers – a term that refers to minors sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“When we wrote the proposal, we focused on the ideas of successful decarceration evidence-based strategies for releasing long-term folks,” said Abrams, one of the study’s co-authors. “One of our questions is: Is there equity in who’s being released and who’s not?”

Abrams added that although the juvenile lifer population is small, identifying factors that help this group thrive and succeed could also benefit other groups of long-term prisoners.

The implementation of strict crime policies in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in more severe sentences for minors convicted of violent crimes during that period, the study found.

However, recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings in two cases – Miller v. Alabama in 2012 and Montgomery v. Louisiana in 2016 – declared mandatory life sentences for juveniles unconstitutional. This prompted the resentencing of more than 2,500 people and the release of more than 1,000 people in various states, according to the study.

The study’s research team also partnered with two organizations, The Sentencing Project and the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, to cross-check sentencing and incarceration databases, Abrams said.

Co-author Rebecca Turner, the associate legal director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, said enough time had passed from these two cases to assess the state of the juvenile lifer population and report information from a national perspective.

The term “juvenile lifer” is fairly new, said co-author J.Z. Bennett. It was coined in the mid-2000s after researchers released a report condemning the U.S. for sentencing minors to life in prison, he added.

In 2023, the nation reached 50 years of mass incarceration, added Bennett, an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Criminal Justice.

“In the research literature, we have not talked about this population at all,” he said.

Previous research found that one of every seven people incarcerated in the U.S. is serving a life sentence. Before the federal mandates in the Miller case, an estimated 12,000 juveniles had been sentenced to life in prison.

“Our main goal was to put out something that created a common understanding of where things are in terms of juvenile life without parole resentencings and releases, because there’s a lot of patchy information out there,” Turner said.

The release rate of juvenile lifers from prison differs over state lines, with some states pushing toward ending life sentences and others lagging behind, Bennett added.

Another key finding is the extent of racial disparities in the sentencing of juveniles, Turner added. Black people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people, and the difference is especially stark in the sentencing of children, she said.

The U.S. is the only developed country in the world that sentences minors to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Bennett said. He added that this conflicts with an international provision, Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits life sentences for minors.

Disparities in state-level sentencing and policies directly impact juveniles in prison, said Daphne Brydon, another co-author. The study also found that while there have been federal changes to combat the severe sentencing of minors, this does not necessarily mean each state is adhering to regulations, she added.

“We have to ask ourselves, as a society, what type of society we want to be,” Bennett said. “Is there a possibility for people to have a second chance? And what does that look like for meaningful opportunity to reform?”

The long-term goal of the project is to look at how various policy responses have influenced juvenile lifer outcomes to offer insight into what future policy reform should be, Turner said. Future research will also involve looking into incarcerated people’s lifestyles and safety upon release, she added.

“Proposing reforms is a complicated question because every state has its own system and its own legal framework that you have to work within,” Turner said.

A potential change, however, could be to broaden the age range classified as juvenile in sentencing, said Brydon, who is also a licensed social worker. Some states have already raised the age to up to 24, she added.

“They were kids at the time, which doesn’t excuse what they were involved in, what they did,” Brydon said. “But what we know about human development is that as kids, we’re not the same people that we are in early adulthood, middle adulthood, older adulthood.”

However, Brydon added that reform is not monolithic, and there is no one-size-fits-all change that will benefit the entire juvenile lifer population.

“There are people behind these numbers and their stories, and we’ll be continuing to put those out into the conversation,” she said. “A juvenile lifer is a human, at the end of the day.”