Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued a joint report on Wednesday highlighting the plight of thousands of child offenders serving life sentences in US prisons without hope of parole.
At least 2 225 people are currently held under such sentences for crimes committed before they were 18.
While many of the offenders are now adults, 16% were between 13 and 15 years old at the time they committed their crimes, and an estimated 59% were sentenced to life without parole for their first-ever criminal conviction, the rights watchdogs said.
”Kids who commit serious crimes shouldn’t go scot-free,” said Alison Parker, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, who authored the report.
”But if they are too young to vote or buy cigarettes, they are too young to spend the rest of their lives behind bars,” Parker said.
Forty-two US states have laws allowing children to receive life without parole sentences.
Two years in the making, the 157-page joint report, The Rest of Their Lives, tracks state and national sentencing trends and analyses the race, history and crimes of young offenders.
In 26 states, the sentence of life without parole is mandatory for anyone who is found guilty of committing first-degree murder, regardless of age. According to the report, 93% of youth offenders serving life without parole were convicted of murder.
But the rights groups highlighted the fact that 26& were convicted of ”felony murder,” which holds that anyone involved in a serious crime during which someone is killed is also guilty of murder by association.
The report cited the life without parole sentence handed down to 15-year-old ”Peter A” who had stolen a van to act as a getaway driver for a robbery. He was waiting in the vehicle when one of the robbers murdered two victims.
”Although I was present at the scene, I never shot or killed anyone,” Peter said.
William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said it was time to ”untie the hands” of state and federal judges and prosecutors.
”Give them options other than turning the courts into assembly lines that mass produce mandatory life without parole sentences for children, that ignore their enormous potential for change and rob them of all hopes for redemption,” Schulz said.
According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the data in the report offers no evidence that the use of life sentences is helpful in reducing juvenile crime rates.
”Public safety can be protected without subjecting youth to the harshest prison sentence possible,” said Parker.
Nationwide, black youth receive life without parole sentences at a rate estimated to be 10 times greater than that of white youth, the report found.
Many of those interviewed in the report spoke of being badly treated and raped as adolescents in prison.
One inmate, Richard, who was 14 at the time of his crime and entered prison at age 16, said the abuse almost drove him to suicide.
”When I went to prison … I was like, ‘I can’t do no life sentence here at that age,”’ Richard said.
”And so I thought of that [suicide]. Gotta end it, gotta end it … I’ve got so many cuts on me … razor blades. They give us disposable razors, you pop it out,” he said. – AFP
