Across America, offenders under the age of 18 - who cannot be legally sentenced to death - are being sentenced instead to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. When it comes to child prisoners, though, life sentences are the moral and legal equivalent of the death penalty - yet their fate goes largely unnoticed.

There are nearly 3,000 people who are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were minors - including children as young as 13. That’s roughly the same as the number of adult prisoners on death row. Even though these young offenders will not die at the hands of an executioner, they are still being condemned to die in the custody of the state.

Such punishments raise profound legal and ethical questions, especially when imposed on underage offenders. The US supreme court’s reasons for abolishing the juvenile death penalty (in Roper v Simmons in 2005) are also compelling reasons to end life imprisonment for children.

The court accepted that children have a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” because the relevant parts of their brains have not yet fully developed. If children cannot be as morally blameworthy as adults, the court reasoned, they should be subject to less severe punishments than adult offenders. It follows that, in those 18 states that have abolished the death penalty outright and retain life without parole as their most severe sanction, young offenders must not be sentenced to the most severe prison term that is available to adults. And in those states with the death penalty, we can reasonably ask whether sending a 14 or 15 year-old to prison for the rest of their natural life – probably about 50 years or so until they die – is really a “milder” punishment than sending an adult to spend about 15 years on death row before they die.

There is always some hope for the reform and rehabilitation of young people. In the court’s words, children under the age of 18 are not “irretrievably depraved”. Justice Kennedy noted that, “from a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed”. So why do we lock up children without giving them any incentive to reform, and without giving them a chance to show that they’ve changed?

Virtually all young people who commit heinous crimes have themselves been the victim of abuse, and are among the most vulnerable of children, the court found. Research by the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth has found disturbingly high rates of abuse suffered by those serving juvenile life sentences. As the court recognized, vulnerable people should not be subject to such severe sanctions.



The US was - at the time of the court ruling - the only country in the world that formally condoned the juvenile death penalty, in violation of international human rights law. According to research, there is presently not a single person outside of the US who is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for an offense committed as a child. Once again, the US is a pariah state in its treatment of young offenders.

The supreme court has routinely been critical of such punishments, restricting these sentences in 2010 to cases involving homicides, and outlawing mandatory sentences of life without parole in 2012. In both cases, it reaffirmed its reasoning in the juvenile death penalty case.

Although the US is clearly moving in the right direction, it cannot move fast enough. Many of these children have committed horrific crimes, and we should never forget that. But we can’t continue to send young people to wither away in prison, especially given all we know about child development and immaturity. The rest of the world has realized this long ago. Now its America’s turn.