“The State was Patiently Waiting for Me to Die”: Life without the Possibility of Parole as Punishment

What is Life without the Possibility of Parole?

“Life without the possibility of parole can mean a million things,” Joseph Dole writes from an Illinois prison. ¹⁰ “As its name implies, it encompasses the entire remainder of one’s life. So what does such a sentence really mean?” Before we look at how those serving life respond, we must consider why this question is not often asked and answered by the greater American public. “Life without the possibility of parole” is difficult to discuss because of its labyrinthine legal and political development in the United States. No single legal status or philosophy is evident across jurisdictions’ haphazard implementation of perpetual confinement. What has further curbed conversation is that the intertwined histories of the death penalty and civil death statutes have diminished what attention is paid life imprisonment and the vocabulary used to describe it.

A life sentence did not always mean life. Although the United States has long dealt long sentences at the state and federal level, penal reform from the mid-nineteenth century till the 1970s introduced indeterminate sentencing and parole to enable eventual release. ¹¹ As imprisoned intellectual Jon E. Yount writes, “parole does not forgive an offender”; it is rather “the disciplinary treatment of those who seem capable of rehabilitation outside prison walls.” ¹² While it does keep the parolee under some form of custody, parole acknowledges that those incarcerated can improve. By the 1940s all states and the federal government offered parole, and in 1977 the percentage of eligible prisoners rose to a high of 72%. ¹³ Waits could be short. For more than half of the twentieth century, those sentenced to life at the federal level were eligible to parole after ten or fifteen years. ¹⁴ Imprisoned people could also seek to have sentences commuted or crimes pardoned.

Today it is far more likely that a life sentence ends with death in prison. And yet life without the possibility of parole can mean many things, given the varied ways that states have legislated and practiced permanent confinement. Easiest to identify are those statutes that explicitly include this language, often passed to replace laws indirectly enabling the same punishment. ¹⁵ For example, whereas in 1961 Delaware rendered all “life term prisoners” ineligible for parole, in 1972 the legislature introduced “life imprisonment without benefit of parole” as one among several sentences for first-degree murder. ¹⁶ In 1977, however, they removed parole-eligible life sentences so that only death and “imprisonment for the remainder of his or her natural life without benefit of probation or parole” could be sentenced. ¹⁷ Delaware’s history exemplifies how these statutes emerged through meandering and at times conflicting legislation. Yount offers a similar account of the state that imprisoned him. Pennsylvania passed the Parole Act in 1941 to curtail reentry programs begun in 1909; yet this act included contradictory sections enabling the parole board to release prisoners but also limiting its power to parole “convicts condemned to death or serving life imprisonment.” ¹⁸ Though amendments addressed those conflicts, the board remained effectively unable to parole without a governor’s commutation. ¹⁹ It was only in 1982 that the legislature added “without parole” to life sentencing guidelines. ²⁰

What states mean by “life” and “without the possibility of parole” thus varies greatly. ²¹ Arizona, for example, still distinguishes between “life” and permanent “natural life” sentences. ²² These convoluted semantics also characterize legislatures’ efforts over the past decades to make nonhomicide offenses eligible for permanent confinement. Today Pennsylvania is among the states where being an accomplice in a crime that leads to a murder can land someone in prison for life. ²³ In at least 37 states, LWOP can be sentenced for kidnapping, carjacking, robbery, burglary, and battery. ²⁴ Delaware demonstrates how habitual offender laws have broadened the use of life imprisonment; a 1970 bill enabled the courts to sentence to life a “habitual criminal” who had committed three among a list of felonies. ²⁵ These are but a few examples of how legislatures have haphazardly yet consistently established this slow death row, such that as of 2012 the mere handful of states that had such laws in 1970 had risen to 49, including D.C. and the federal system. ²⁶

Even those sentenced where parole is statutorily possible may find it unattainable. The only state not to have an LWOP statute, Alaska requires a 99-year sentence for particular homicides. ²⁷ Mandatory minimums and “truth-in-sentencing” policies (which require the punished to serve out a high percentage of their sentence) also render parole unlikely. ²⁸ In states that have not abolished parole, longer wait times, narrowing rights to participate, and gubernatorial oversight make parole unlikely. ²⁹ This leaves limited opportunities for release in commutation or clemency, both of which are generally granted by elected officials whose mercy presents what Marie Gottschalk calls a “political trip wire,” triggered if the paroled reoffend. ³⁰ As of 2016, Maryland housed a total of 4,158 individuals serving some form of life imprisonment, with only 338 sentenced without parole. ³¹ Yet, since a high-profile murder in 1993, no governor has accepted the Parole Commission’s recommendations, commuting merely a few cases. ³² A group serving time calls this “The Maryland Lifer’s Dilemma.” ³³

It is difficult to ask and answer Dole’s question because the very term “life without the possibility of parole” masks the convoluted emergence and exercise of perpetual confinement across the United States. In his study of Florida’s legislation, sociologist Christopher Seeds describes how LWOP grew “as a new penal thing in a multiplicity of forms and generative processes,” “bric-a-brac” sentencing “by turns explicit and unmentioned” in operation. ³⁴ This is perhaps why—as Seeds argues—there has been little research on the haphazard development of these sentences, and why the best guides through these labyrinths remain those imprisoned within them like Yount and the Maryland lifers. ³⁵

A common answer to Dole’s question—that life imprisonment is “the other death penalty”—identifies the inevitable outcome for those who cannot leave prison. It also alludes to the intertwined histories of life without parole and capital punishment. Penal theorists and practitioners have long envisioned natural life sentences as an alternative to death. In the eighteenth century, Cesare Beccaria advocated “permanent penal servitude” not as secondary but better than capital punishment: “it is not the intensity, but the extent of a punishment which makes the greatest impression on the human soul.” ³⁶ Perpetual imprisonment would deter those individuals convicted or considering crime, would offer society “many lasting lessons” where an execution’s “spectacle” would only dazzle. ³⁷ Americans have elected life sentences as a procedural or moral alternative to capital punishment. For example, Delaware replaced the death penalty with “life imprisonment” in 1958 before restoring it three years later while abolishing parole. ³⁸ This was a prelude to a pervasive legal development in the next decade. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court effected a moratorium on death penalties when it ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the state’s system condemned its citizens to die on arbitrary grounds, particularly on race. ³⁹ As Seeds argues of Florida, this brief abolition did not affect all states the same. ⁴⁰ And yet, broadly, Furman influenced life imprisonment in two ways.

First, states established new procedures to address the Court’s claims: that, as Justice Potter Stewart exclaimed, executions were “so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.” ⁴¹ Georgia responded by creating a bifurcated system. ⁴² In the conviction stage, legal actors proceed as normal to evaluate the guilt of the defendant. In the sentencing phase, however, the jury is provided with mitigating and aggravating factors to holistically evaluate whether this individual deserves death. Georgia also added an automatic appeal of any death sentence to its highest court, charged to evaluate that the sentence is proportional, meets the aggravating factors, and was not influenced by prejudice, passion, or another arbitrary factor. These procedures provide what Josh Bowers calls an “express level for mercy.” ⁴³ In 1976, the Supreme Court ended capital punishment’s brief moratorium when it judged these new procedures constitutional in Gregg v. Georgia.

These procedures do not apply to the other death penalty. And while the Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional to mandate death sentences, what Jessica Henry calls “death-in-prison” sentences are often mandatory. ⁴⁴ This is significant given Furman’s second broad impact on life imprisonment. Following that case, many states moved to implement or improve life without parole sentencing to replace the death penalty, as Delaware had done in 1958. ⁴⁵ But these states did not eliminate life imprisonment once the Supreme Court resurrected the death penalty in Gregg. As was true of Delaware (passing its habitual offender law in 1970), states instead applied permanent confinement to a widening range of offenses not punishable by death.

The modern politics and procedures of capital punishment have distracted legal actors and activists from diagnosing a metastasizing form of life imprisonment. Amid the great national discussion over capital punishment, the Supreme Court weighed in through the 1974 case Schick v. Reed to contend meekly that life without parole “does not offend the Constitution.” ⁴⁶ Former federal prosecutor I. Bennett Capers recalls how the prevailing constitutional principle—that “death is different”—and capital punishment procedures relieved him of paying much mind to those he sent to life in prison. ⁴⁷ This inattention is also evident among activists. It was not only harsh-on-crime conservatives but death penalty abolitionists that encouraged state legislatures to implement life as an allegedly humane alternative. ⁴⁸ “Our ‘friends’ on the left have made the other death penalty the socially acceptable form of execution,” founder and executive director of the Other Death Penalty Project Kenneth Hartman writes from a California prison. ⁴⁹ Deliberation over capital punishment has preoccupied lawyers, judges, legislators, activists, and voters while LWOP proliferates. “We can easily imagine someone sitting in an electric chair or in a gas chamber or strapped to a gurney awaiting lethal injection,” Capers writes, but “where our imagination often seems inadequate is in imagining life behind bars. What do we know about life without parole?” ⁵⁰

For much of American history, the idea of civil death offered an imperfect way to imagine life imprisonment. “With living men regarded as dead, dead men returning to life, and the same man considered alive for one purpose but dead for another,” the Harvard Law Review wrote in 1937, “the realm of legal fiction acquires a touch of the supernatural under the paradoxical doctrine of civil death.” ⁵¹ Whereas the death penalty denies the punished their body, civil death revokes their rights. In medieval and early modern English common law, punishments ranging from abjuration to banishment, attainder, or felony conviction might deny the civilly dead a variety of rights concerning their estate or inheritance. ⁵² Civil death’s American form first emerged in a 1799 New York statute (which as of 1822 was interpreted to render the convict unable to sue yet vulnerable to suit), and in the early nineteenth century many more states experimented with varieties of the legal status and its implications. ⁵³

The paradigmatic example of American civil death is the 1871 Virginia state supreme court case Ruffin v. Commonwealth, in which the once enslaved and then imprisoned Woody Ruffin was convicted for murdering a guard while leased to work on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. ⁵⁴ Ruffin challenged the judge’s death sentence on the grounds that he was tried by a jury selected from Richmond rather than Bath—the location of the penitentiary rather than his offense. ⁵⁵ As the judge infamously claimed in ruling against Ruffin,

For the time being, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being the slave of the State. He is civiliter mortuus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man. ⁵⁶

Evident here is how civil death replaced the slaver with the state; as Colin Dayan observes, New York passed that first civil death statute just as it abolished slavery. ⁵⁷ Rebecca McLennan argues that experiments with civil death paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for slavery “as a punishment for crime.” ⁵⁸ The judge’s remarks in Ruffin reveal too that civil death was more of a legal limbo. Though Ruffin’s property was forfeit, beyond the walls he was “in the eye of the law, still a convict in the penitentiary,” that status attached to him like “the ball and chain which he drags after him.” ⁵⁹ The civilly dead remained subjects to the law and often retained some rights. “How much of the convict is civilly dead and how much civilly alive?” asked a judge of this ambiguity in an 1888 case. ⁶⁰

In ruling against Ruffin, the judge was careful to tether civil death to the location and duration of imprisonment, imagining that though the defendant found himself at Bath his “vicinage as to him is within the walls of the penitentiary,” his civil death endured “for the time being.” ⁶¹ Yet a broader history shows civil death transform from a statutory condition of life imprisonment to the many “invisible punishments” affixed to anyone convicted. ⁶² In 1937, the Harvard Law Review wondered what would come of civil death statutes with the rise of indeterminate sentencing and parole, and indeed in the following decades most jurisdictions abolished these laws. ⁶³ Whereas 13 states had some form of a civil death statute in 1970, today only New York, Rhode Island, and the Virgin Islands do. ⁶⁴ What persist, though, are laws like those developed in the nineteenth century and perfected in the twentieth that codify what Gabriel J. Chin calls the “new civil death”: the collateral consequences that restrict the rights of those convicted from voting, employment, housing, and more. ⁶⁵

With the transformation of civil death we have lost one way to distinguish life imprisonment. What Dayan calls the “magic” of civil death whereby “the soul is killed before the body dies” now occurs through any number of rituals, including but not limited to life sentences. ⁶⁶ Within roughly the same period, states abolished that old form of statutory civil death while cobbling together death-in-prison penalties. As early as 1872, California punished homicide with death or “natural life” and civil death. ⁶⁷ Its rehabilitative shift in the early twentieth century widened the use of parole until 1976, when the penal code was revised to specify “confinement in the state prison without the possibility of parole” as one punishment for some homicides—just one year after the state assembly abolished its civil death statute. ⁶⁸ Of course, California had developed other collateral consequences of conviction. But there, as elsewhere, civil death is no longer tied to life imprisonment.

It is unsurprising that today we find so little public discussion of life without the possibility of parole. Seeds writes that “to speak of LWOP is not to speak of a single type of law or isolated penal practice, nor can one assume that LWOP was the result of any single politics, motive set or ideology.” ⁶⁹ Judges alternatively portray those sentenced as redeemable or monstrous where the death penalty is or is not available, and public support for capital punishment too depends upon the availability of life without parole. ⁷⁰ Philosophers have found permanent incarceration difficult to justify; penal theorists devise different arguments to suit their social needs. ⁷¹ And underlying all efforts are those histories of the death penalty and civil death that confuse our understanding of life imprisonment. While it is accurate to describe those imprisoned for life as subjected to the other death penalty and civil death, neither really answer Dole’s question. What is life without the possibility of parole?

The Possibility of Life as Punishment

Those who bear witness to these sentences reveal that life without the possibility of parole is not a life without possibility. That the state patiently awaits their death confronts many as a challenge to seize life in the present, to grow as individuals and communities. One among the many answers offered by Dole is that life without parole “means convincing yourself daily that your life has value even when the rest of the world tells you you’re worthless.” ⁷² But these testimonies reveal too that the punishment of a life without parole is not merely civil death or death in prison. What punishes is the very possibility of a natural life. The potentiality of what can be done in the present grinds the individual between the futility of what could have been done and what could be done were release an option.

Life imprisonment severs the punished from the world beyond prison. “I’ve realized that life without the possibility of parole is the death of my heart,” Charlie Praphatananda reflects while incarcerated, “the death of me as a social person.” ⁷³ In Erving Goffman’s pivotal work, the prison as “total institution” is an enclosed and formally administered space that cuts newcomers of social and economic ties. ⁷⁴ But whereas Goffman attributed this “mortification of the self” to the penitentiary’s spatial separation from society, it is the finality of a life sentence that causes its kind of social death. ⁷⁵ Drawing from interviews over two periods with twenty-five men serving life without parole, Margaret Leigey describes common feelings of detachment among those disconnected from networks of financial and emotional support. ⁷⁶ Between the shame of imprisonment and the burden of visits, a life in prison results in estrangement for many. ⁷⁷ As Praphatananda writes, “once our loved ones step out of the visiting room for the last time, we’ll never see them again. Life without the possibility of parole also means without the possibility of reunion.” ⁷⁸ What civil death did for the state—you who are condemned for life will not need your rights, so why have them?—life imprisonment does for society. Imprisoned poet Michael L. Owens recalls “what it feels like for family & friends”: “you walk up to them, say I’m dead now and shoot yourself right then & there.” ⁷⁹

Their connections to the world fading, those facing life without parole reconstruct community among themselves. ⁸⁰ “I longed to be part of a self-governing body,” Victor Hassine remembers of joining a “lifers meeting” at Graterford State Prison. ⁸¹ New connections are forged despite the danger and deprivation of prison life: the loss of privacy, autonomy, the higher risk of violence and disease. ⁸² Alongside the rise of life imprisonment came the decline of the rehabilitative ideal, and today those sentenced to death-in-prison are routinely excluded from the few programs left. ⁸³ Thus the new selves and societies created behind bars are usually incidental to the work of corrections. ⁸⁴ For some, change is an inevitable result of time spent separated from the contexts that contributed to their crimes. ⁸⁵ Others are more active. Many encounter what John Irwin and others call an “awakening” through which they seek acceptance of their wrongs and reform in their character and contributions to others. ⁸⁶ Robin Ledbetter writes from York Correctional how she “came to understand the devastation of my crime.” ⁸⁷ Though this led to her first suicide attempt, so too did it convince her that she does not “deserve to spend the rest of [her] life here.”

Ledbetter’s development demonstrates how what is possible in a natural life comes to punish those serving it. Common across the contributions to the Other Death Penalty Project’s Too Cruel, Not Unusual Enough is a reckoning with what its editors call “the problem of remorse”: the challenge of redemption after committing “the ultimate bad act.” ⁸⁸ This captures the general difficulty of processing the past into a productive present. “You’re constantly being told that you aren’t worth rehabilitation,” Dole writes. ⁸⁹ Given the finality of life sentences, any educational or moral or collective developments achieved are challenges to whoever gave the sentence. As Hartman puts it, “more than 30 years ago a judge made a decision to prevent me from ever earning parole because I couldn’t change for the better. But I did.” ⁹⁰ What he and others endure is likely similar to what confronts others in prison—and particularly those who might live decades on death row. ⁹¹ But these testimonies suggest that it is the tension between what is possible in life and the state’s awaiting natural death that distinguishes this punishment from others that weaponize life.

Consider the subtle differences between permanent and solitary confinement. As Lisa Guenther has argued, to sequester an individual in a small, lit cell for 23 or 24 hours a day with no contact but a food tray passed through a small slot is to turn “their own capacities to feel, perceive, and relate to others in a meaningful world into instruments of their own undoing.” ⁹² Persons are not simply separated from society but are unbound by their sociability. Where Michel Foucault showed how a reformatory schedule disciplines, Guenther argues that solitary undoes one’s very capacity to “do time”: “to exist as a temporal subject rather than an object persisting through time.” ⁹³ Moments of consciousness or the days of the calendar give time a “social meaning” that is alienated in solitary. ⁹⁴ Those serving life (who are also likely to endure solitary) describe their sentences as not an undoing but overdoing of time, a surplus with limited value, possibility without purpose. “Imagine living a life without a point, a reason, or a direction—breathing but never living,” Tracie Bernardi writes from York Correctional. ⁹⁵ “If by punishment you wanted me to feel great pain, sorrow, empathy, suffering, guilt, worthlessness, and to feel inhuman, you accomplished that decades ago,” Spoon Jackson writes, so what left is there to do with time? ⁹⁶ As experiences accumulate across units of life, the methods by which we all do time—how we remember, how we grow—lose meaning.

Many serving life contend with what could have been otherwise among the choices and conditions that put them in prison. Memory is a site for self-reflection that increasingly distances the self from those past moments. Hartman writes that “life without the possibility of parole freezes someone into their worst moment forever”: at that moment, “whatever possibilities stretched out” between him and his victim “closed down.” ⁹⁷ The more years that pass in prison must be balanced by the increasing weight of those moments, memories that nonetheless deteriorate over time. Ledbetter recalls how she asks guards, “Do you remember what you were doing when you were fourteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty? Can you chart your growth, the lessons you have learned?” ⁹⁸ “I can barely remember the details of that terrible night,” Hartman laments. ⁹⁹ The gravity of the past can compress the present into seeming insignificance. For Dole, LWOP is “a compounding of second upon second, minute upon minute, hour upon hour, of wasted existence, and decade upon decade of mental and emotional torture culminating in death.” ¹⁰⁰

Those living without parole relay too how the possibility of what could be punishes them. As Luis J. Rodriguez writes, LWOP “goes against one of the main laws of nature, of God if you will, that as long as there is life, a seed, the right environment, a nurturing reality, anything can renew, regenerate, and become better than it was before.” ¹⁰¹ Without an opportunity to leave prison, efforts to develop beyond past actions yield little fruit. “I have flourished and sprouted healthy roots,” Ledbetter writes, “I need a garden where I can continue to grow.” ¹⁰² In similar testimonies from those who have experienced solitary confinement, nature signifies instead the outdoors and the free. ¹⁰³ But as Martin Williams writes, when serving life without parole “the main enemy to prison is life, growth, creation. Plants are illegal.” ¹⁰⁴

To be sure, those sentenced to life testify that their punishment is also “death by incarceration,” that they endure the civil death that shadows almost any brush with criminal justice today. ¹⁰⁵ Yet what resonates throughout these testimonies is that a natural life sentence converts life’s possibilities into punishment. People create community to replace those lost; they change. For some, these efforts are inspired by the slim chance that a new court case or a commutation may provide a way out through the legal labyrinth. ¹⁰⁶ “We understand the language, the wording which clearly states that there will be no chance of a second chance,” Praphatananda writes: “of course, none of us really believes this.” ¹⁰⁷ As Ernest Kikuta Chavez has argued, though, even those approaching a natural death in prison “assert their humanity against a dehumanizing institution by creating death rituals for one another.” ¹⁰⁸ For those who will die in prison, living that life up to its surrender is both an act of resistance and the punishment itself.

Democracy without Possibility

There is little question that trends in life imprisonment bear heavy consequences for American democracy. As Sharon Dolovich argues, extended sentences have effectively produced a “permanent prisoner” class. ¹⁰⁹ Others identify them as a return to older punishments. “LWOP is an attempt by a society to banish an offender for the remainder of his or her natural life,” Yount writes. ¹¹⁰ In accounts like these we see how natural life sentences are not so unique as they are the exemplary punishment in an exclusionary society. ¹¹¹ Indeed many have observed similar effects in the history of disenfranchisement. Pippa Holloway has shown how the antebellum South believed that democracy required denying the vote to those considered “degraded due to their race or their infamy” so to preserve “the dignity of the citizenship itself.” ¹¹² The same can be said of life sentences. “We create invisible cities, so that we can live in new cities,” Capers writes. ¹¹³

What then is it like to live in those new cities? In line with what Andrew Dilts has asked and answered of disenfranchisement, what does it mean to live in a democracy that punishes people with their own natural lives? ¹¹⁴ What are we to make of the haphazard yet invariable movements of citizens—judges and juries, legislators and voters—to codify what Hartman calls the “ultimate anti-human prison sentence”? ¹¹⁵ Historical and contemporary debates have certainly crafted new legal fictions to underwrite life sentencing: the “incorrigible other” that Thomas Alan Dichter traces in earlier penal programs, or what Dilts identifies as the “fully responsible monster” evident in California’s recent legislation. ¹¹⁶ These figures play an important role in what Caleb Smith (drawing on Charles Taylor) calls the “social imaginary” of punishment in the United States: the ways of seeing, narrating, knowing by which actors ground criminal justice practices. ¹¹⁷

When arrayed alongside the laws and court opinions and claims that characterize its labyrinthine development, though, testimonial accounts clarify the more foundational role that life imprisonment plays in today’s American imagination. Life without the possibility of parole both relies upon and reinforces a vision that not some but anyone in a democracy is some steps from irretrievable exclusion. After all, is it the prison that “keeps us separated,” Bernardi asks, “or is it society’s inability to accept that people who make mistakes are capable of change?” ¹¹⁸ To condemn people to live and die in prison is to deny the very possibility of democratic life. Life sentencing is “a statement of condemnation against even the mere possibility a person might, someday in the future, manage to struggle against the odds and become better than their worst moment,” Hartman writes. ¹¹⁹

There are similarities between this vision and that which sustains the American commitment to capital punishment. Both portray punishment as a point of no return. But that capital punishment manifests in the American imagination as those final steps before an execution (as Capers observed) suggests that Americans see there an expression of agency. Perhaps they do not feel personally responsible, but they know that the state must act—and it is likely this that keeps capital punishment “on the plane of the imaginary” despite its declining use, as David Garland writes. ¹²⁰ The same cannot be said of life imprisonment. Those who have cobbled together death-in-prison sentences may think it a humane alternative. “It’s true that one could argue I’ve still carved a kind of life out of my isolation,” Hartman admits. ¹²¹ But with this punishment they and those they represent abdicate responsibility for the inevitable deaths of those punished. As Chavez has shown, since deaths of old age or illness “are often passed off as deceases by natural causes, the prison institution exonerates itself from any responsibility in orchestrating death.” ¹²² Americans do not imagine themselves executioners; those punished are left to be agents over their own lives and deaths. Life imprisonment is not only the unintended consequence of capital punishment’s legal and political development, but also its shadow in the American imagination. The implication of life imprisonment is that nothing we do with our lives after that sentence—whether we live them inside or outside prison—will be the grounds of revisiting and rebuilding from that wrong.

Life without the possibility of parole constitutes a vision fundamentally at odds with restorative justice. “Is it the outcast or those that cast away//Whose hearts have become so numb,” the now-free Halim A. Flowers wrote while imprisoned for life. ¹²³ If restorative justice envisions wrongdoing as a grievance around which members of a community replace what bonds are broken, a democracy with natural life sentences envisions itself incapable of responding to certain injustices. Keep in mind that restorative justice envisions a broad array of responses—not all of which require redemption, forgiveness, or absolution. This is what renders life without the possibility of parole so troubling and the testimonies of those serving it so necessary to illuminate this dark area in the American imagination. “Perhaps it is time to focus the light on yourselves,” Jackson writes. ¹²⁴ Though infrequently addressed in public discourse, life without parole is revealed here as foundational to what Americans envision as the possibility and impossibility of democratic life. ¹²⁵

Conclusion: Life Writing against Life Sentences

In his dissenting remarks on the 1987 case McCleskey v. Kemp, Justice William Brennan pronounced that “those whom we would banish from society or from the human community itself often speak in too faint a voice to be heard above society’s demand for punishment. It is the particular role of courts to hear these voices.” ¹²⁶ He said these words to defend Warren McCleskey, a black man convicted of murder in Georgia who had argued that the documented racial bias of capital punishment in the state should invalidate the charges. Though with good intentions, Brennan was wrong to claim that those excluded are too quiet and that the courts alone can amplify their voices. Yes, recent rulings have shown a Supreme Court increasingly empathetic with those they might condemn to a life in prison. In 2010, the Court ruled in Graham v. Florida that sentencing juveniles to life without parole for nonhomicide offenses denies them hope. ¹²⁷ In 2012, the justices struck down similar sentences for homicide, and in 2016 they ruled that states must revisit those already sentenced to life. But the Court has otherwise ignored the many who voice similar appeals. Hope is a common claim throughout the testimonies of those imprisoned for life. Dortell Williams describes his struggle to find it despite his “permanent house of hopelessness.” ¹²⁸ Joseph Badagliacca describes his incarceration like a “medical drip” that “siphons my spirit from me with each breath I take”: but every so often he draws upon another “life support system” that offers him “small doses of what I call Hope.” ¹²⁹ As Capers points out, “what is true for juveniles is true of all prisoners. Hope matters.” ¹³⁰

Still, Brennan is right to indict society’s own deafness. The legal actors and legislators and citizens responsible for the development of life imprisonment have done little to listen to those they imprison. As evident in the testimonies surveyed here, this punishment has left those living in prison to confront their possibility while those who punish deny the potential for a more just democratic future. “Life called from the silent concrete pre-fab sealed by the immeasurable weight of a society helpless to deal with or confront its own shadow, which is we in the box,” Martin Williams writes: “I wanted life, with or without anything, crazy life, unknowable life, gameless and placeless life.” ¹³¹ Life without the possibility of parole is one among the productive contradictions that Angela Davis identifies in the American imagination. “People tend to take prisons for granted,” she argues—“it is difficult to imagine life without them”—and yet “there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them.” ¹³²

Any effort to end perpetual confinement in the United States must center upon the testimonies of those who endure it. A good example is the recent book The Meaning of Life, wherein Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis intersperse the biographies of imprisoned and returning citizens throughout their argument for a twenty-year limit on all sentences and to reform reentry programs, parole, and public safety policies. ¹³³ With these voices included, the authors avoid what democratic theorists term “penal elitism” or “penal populism.” ¹³⁴ While the two approaches express contradictory claims to speak for the people’s interest or will, both downplay the need for democratic action in addressing injustice. But as the formerly incarcerated Willis X. Harris told Mauer and Nellis, “the general public has a lot of power they don’t realize they have.” ¹³⁵

Life narrative remains a powerful counter to life without the possibility of parole, though the definition and dilemma that I offer also indicate some risk. Writings like Prewitt’s, Hartman’s, Williams’s, and others invoked here illuminate the shadows of American understanding and exorcise what Dichter calls the “specter of the incorrigible” haunting modern punishment. ¹³⁶ The website Voices of Lifers presents a collection of mostly biographical writings from lifers in Maryland; as the site explains, these writings intend to contest popular depictions of lifers as “life-long career criminals—incapable of positive change.” ¹³⁷ Life writing offers incarcerated people myriad modes of resilience and resistance. Reflecting on the work of the PEN Prison Writing Program, Bell Gale Chevigny concludes that “the best prison writing continues to testify to hidden experience, to critique and resist institutionalization, but it also helps writers to find themselves, make themselves whole, forge significant contact with others, and make reparations.” ¹³⁸ Above all, life writing testifies to the agency of those living behind bars. “The testimony of slaves and prisoners bear witness not to the utter annihilation of the person, not to an absolute indifference of life and death,” Guenther writes, “but to a life against death that is more than bare survival.” ¹³⁹

The risk of relying upon testimony is that Americans are all too capable of interpreting endurance or redemption as proof that punishment is just. Indeed, the imagination underwriting life sentences envisions such agency as evidence that nothing more could be done by any party to wrongdoing. Responding to Guenther’s work on solitary confinement, Jill Stauffer asks: “What happens when a survivor tries to narrate a destruction of self and world, but what gets heard by those who listen is a redemptive story about resilience?” ¹⁴⁰ Other authors like Miranda Fricker and José Medina have diagnosed similar democratic failings in how we acknowledge and respond to testimonial evidence of injustice. ¹⁴¹ To argue for life sentences against life without the possibility of parole is to ask not that we listen uncritically, but that we build from these engagements a truly, radically democratic effort to end life imprisonment. In the words of Kenneth Hartman, “at the very core of our culture resides the concept of restoration, like a harbor light to the lost—extinguishing this light for anyone darkens everyone’s journey.” ¹⁴²