There’s a saying that one day everyone will die alone. And as Bartley stood in the corner of the concrete-and-chain-link prison yard, watching feeble old men shuffle alongside Crips and Bloods and Norteños and skinheads, he could feel himself believing it.

Right there, among murderers and sex offenders, was where he would die.

“I just remember saying, ‘My God, how am I going to survive?’” he said. “I don’t care how tough you are, there’s always someone tougher in prison.”

He was arrested at 31 and spent more than a year in jail before being sentenced to life without parole under Washington state’s persistent-offender law — more commonly referred to as the three-strikes law. When he was growing up, getting arrested wasn’t something he feared — it was just part of life.

Bartley, who had previously committed a second-degree robbery and a second-degree assault, finally earned his third strike and life sentence in 1998 for his participation in a string of robberies. That guy — the one who demanded that people give him their money — needed to be behind bars. Bartley admits prison was probably the only thing that could have forced him out of his crack addiction and street-crime lifestyle.

But by the time he got his third strike, it was too late for him.

Nearly 160,000 people are serving life sentences in America’s prisons, according to a recent report by the Sentencing Project (PDF), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for criminal-justice reform. Thirty-one percent of those people, like Bartley, won’t ever go before a parole board. A separate study by the American Civil Liberties Union found that nearly 4,000 prisoners in the U.S. will serve life in prison for nonviolent offenses.

As of this year, the 20th anniversary of Washington becoming the first state to pass a three-strikes law, the state’s prisons are flooded with lifers. Washington is one of seven states where more than 15 percent of the entire prison population is serving a life sentence. It’s also home to the second-largest population of prisoners serving life without parole for non-homicide crimes — neighboring Idaho is No. 1. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Washington’s prisoners who are serving life without parole were sentenced under three strikes, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.