People Serving Life Exceeds Entire Prison Population of 1970

Posted on: February 20, 2020 at 14:46:50 CT

As states come to terms with the consequences of 40
years of prison expansion, sentencing reform efforts
across the country have focused on reducing stays in
prison or jail for those convicted of nonviolent drug and
property crimes. At the same time, policymakers have
largely neglected to address the staggering number of
people serving life sentences, comprising one of seven
people in prisons nationwide. International comparisons
document the extreme nature of these developments.
The United States now holds an estimated 40% of the
world population serving life imprisonment and 83% of
those serving life without the possibility of parole. The
expansion of life imprisonment has been a key component of the development of mass incarceration.
In this report, we present a closer look at the rise in life
sentences amidst the overall incarceration expansion.
To place the growth of life imprisonment in perspective,
the national lifer population of 206,000 now exceeds
the size of the entire prison population in 1970, just
prior to the prison population explosion of the following
four decades. In 24 states, there are now more people
serving life sentences than were in the entire prison
population in 1970,1
and in an additional nine states,
the life imprisonment total is within 100 people of the
1970 prison population.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/People-Serving-Life-Exceeds-Entire-Prison-Population-of-1970.pdf