"It's like someone dying, but not being put to rest," said Dicky Joe Jackson, 55, who has served 17 years of a life-without-parole sentence because he transported and sold methamphetamine to pay for a life-saving bone marrow transplant and other medical treatments for his son.

For many Americans, when they hear a story like this involving meth, it might conjure up flashbacks to Walter White in "Breaking Bad," but this is nothing like TV, this is real and raw, and the sad reality for thousands of nonviolent offenders in this country who serve life-without-parole sentences.

Over 3,200 people - 3,278 to be exact, are in federal and state prisons serving life-without-parole for nonviolent crimes in the U.S., according to a report conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Many of the nonviolent offenses in the ACLU report seem petty when compared to other cases where murderers often get off scot-free. These nonviolent offenses range from stealing a $159 jacket or serving as a middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. In other words, the ACLU's report indicates that 79 percent were convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes, such as possession or distribution and about 20 percent of nonviolent property crimes such as theft.

"Many of them were struggling with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when they committed their crimes," the ACLU adds. "None of them will ever come home to their parents and children. And taxpayers are spending billions to keep them behind bars."

The ACLU's "A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses" highlights 110 case studies involving male and female nonviolent offenders who are currently serving in state and federal prisons. It also delves into how these unjust sentences came to be - with a breakdown of the laws - and the judges whose "hands were tied" when they implemented them.

"There's an answer to this without being so extreme. But we're still-living-20-years-ago extreme. Throw the human away. He's worthless. Boom: up the river. And yet, he didn't even kill anybody. He didn't do anything, but he just had an addiction he couldn't control and he was trying to support it (by) robbing. That's terrible to rob people-I've been robbed, I hate it. I want something done to him. But not all his life. That's extreme. That's cruel and unusual punishment to me," said Burl Cain, a warden at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

What are the racial statistics for nonviolent offenders serving life-without-parole on a state level? Nationwide estimates from the ACLU, indicate that 65.4 percent are African-American, 17.8 percent are white, and 15.7 percent are Latino.

From 1999 to 2011, the percentages of prisoners admitted to federal prison to serve life-without-parole sentences for nonviolent offenses are as follows: 60 percent are African-American, 21 percent are Latino, and 16.4 percent are white.

Taking a closer at specific areas of the country, the ACLU report also showed the rate of Latinos serving life-without-parole for nonviolent offenses ranges from a high of 12.7 per 1,000,000 residents in Louisiana to 9 in Oklahoma, 7.32 in Florida, 1.25 in Illinois, 11.24 in the federal system, and 0 in South Carolina and Mississippi. Latinos are serving life-without-parole for nonviolent crimes at a rate that is almost eight times the rate of whites in Illinois and almost twice the rate of whites in Louisiana.

"The people profiled in our report are an extreme example of the millions of lives ruined by the persistent ratcheting up of our sentencing laws over the last forty years," stated the ACLU's Deputy Legal Director, Vanita Gupta, in a press release. "We must change our sentencing practices to make our justice system smart, fair, and humane. It's time to undo the damage wrought by four decades of the War on Drugs and 'tough-on-crime' attitudes."