Does a life sentence without parole make sense when prisoners who have committed violent crimes are no longer a threat to society? Photograph by Jesse Dearing / The Boston Globe / Getty

It is the midpoint of autumn—the time of year when winter begins to crawl its way onto your skin—and night is beginning to fall as I arrive to teach my writing class at a state prison in Massachusetts. On particularly windy evenings like this, the tops of trees sway back and forth. The sounds of their fraying leaves wrestle against one another like the bristles of an old broom along a wooden floor—its old, worn edges bending and breaking as it moves across the room.

In a classroom on the second floor of this prison, sixteen men in faded blue and gray jumpsuits await the start of class. Each window—on opposite sides of the room—remains a few inches open, just enough to allow the breeze to somersault its way across the room and out again. An enormous concrete wall, topped with barbed wire, demarcates the perimeter of the facility. You are reminded that you are, in fact, inside of a cage.

Here, at one of the state’s more rehabilitation-friendly institutions, there are ample programs for the men to participate in, including sports leagues, a chess club, writing classes, a ministry, and vocational courses. You may, in fact, find yourself forgetting the limits of your freedom, even if just for a moment. But it is important to remind yourself of this fallacy. To look around—at the guards, their black uniforms juxtaposed against the gray halls they patrol, at the perches from which they watch everyone beneath them, at the intercom that informs you when and where you are allowed to move—is to be reminded that this is a space in which the state has made it policy to strip people of agency over their bodies. A cage that allows someone to walk around inside of it is still a cage.

Inside of this cage, countless men are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. They have, fundamentally, been sentenced to die in prison. For a number of them, the sentences they are serving are for crimes that were committed when they were teen-agers.

Near the end of January, the Supreme Court ruled, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, that those serving life sentences for crimes committed as juveniles would have the opportunity to make the case for a chance at a second hearing. This decision makes retroactive a 2012 ruling in Miller v. Alabama, stating that life without the possibility of parole for juveniles is unconstitutional. Among those who have been waiting anxiously on the Montgomery decision is a student in my class whom I’ll call Neal.

Neal’s long beard protrudes from his chin and jawbone, patches of gray scattered haphazardly across the small forest of tight black curls. His oversized sweatshirt and sweatpants belie his rotund frame, and the incandescent light from above reflects off of his cleanly shaven head. His glasses sit precariously on his nose, teetering on the edge of his nostrils. The intonation in his voice connotes a question, even when he is not asking one.

Today, when it is time for each of the men to share his work from the previous week, Neal makes his way to the front of the class and places several pieces of loose-leaf paper atop our makeshift lectern. He adjusts his glasses, and strokes the side of his beard as if to convince his mouth to open. He looks around at each of us, looks down again, and begins to share a story of his childhood. His youth, like many of ours, began with the sort of innocence that shields us from fully absorbing all that transpires around us. Soon, however, his father began to physically abuse him, his brother, and his mother. His mother tried to find an escape through crack cocaine. She became emotionally, and often physically, absent.

Despite an absent mother and abusive father, Neal did his best to hold on to some semblance of a childhood, searching for friendship, mentorship, and guidance anywhere he might find it. He did not find it in a school that failed to support him. He did not find it in a family that had been ripped apart by violence. When he couldn’t find it anywhere else, he fell into the world of gangs and drug dealing; they would look out for him when no one else would. “Finding acceptance in the streets was clearly the wrong choice, but I did what I thought was right at the time,” he said. “I saw more than any eleven-year-old should ever have to experience.” Still in the midst of his teens, and in the heat of a confrontation, Neal took someone’s life. He is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

In the conversation around mass incarceration, the contemporary political discourse often centers on the notion that if we simply release, or reduce the sentences of, all of the nonviolent drug offenders, we will be able to solve the problem of our enormous prison population. This is false. According to the latest Department of Justice statistics, only sixteen per cent of incarcerated people in state prisons are serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Fifty-three per cent are serving sentences for violent offenses, and about nineteen per cent for property offenses, like burglary or larceny. “Even if every single nonviolent drug offender were released tomorrow,” Gilad Edelman wrote last year, “the [U.S.] incarcerated population would stand at around 1.7 million—still nearly a fifth of the world total.”

The much more difficult, and perhaps more necessary, question about incarceration is what our efforts to reduce our prison population mean for people like Neal, those who did indeed commit a violent crime and who are subsequently spending decades upon decades behind bars.

Miller v. Alabama, and now Montgomery v. Louisiana, force us to reckon with this question, but if we are in fact moving toward meaningful decarceration more must be done. If the espoused mission of departments of correction is to “promote public safety by managing offenders while providing care and appropriate programming in preparation for successful reentry into the community”—as stated by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections—we must ask ourselves if putting men and women who committed crimes when they were children, or even young adults, in prison for the rest of their lives moves us toward that goal. Further, if the purpose of incarceration is public safety, what does it mean to keep people in prison when they are no longer a threat to society?

Although it was once assumed that adolescent development was complete by age eighteen, emerging research demonstrates that the brain does not finish developing until one’s mid-twenties, specifically the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making, risk management, and impulse control. Additionally, after a certain age, one’s likelihood of committing another violent offense decreases dramatically. This is becoming increasingly relevant because, at present, about ten per cent of incarcerated people are fifty-five or older, and by 2030, according to a report by the A.C.L.U., that percentage will grow to a third of our prison population. This demographic’s average likelihood of committing another crime is ever-diminishing.

As a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the law now states that people seventeen and younger cannot be sentenced to life without parole, except in the rarest cases. But what about those who committed crimes when they were eighteen? Twenty-one? Twenty-three? Is someone who committed a crime at twenty-five the same person he or she is at sixty-five? We must ask ourselves these questions because mass incarceration is not merely the result of putting away too many people for nonviolent drug offenses; it is the result of putting people who committed violent offenses away for longer than is necessary to promote public safety.