Filed
12:00 p.m. EST
02.01.2025
The number of people imprisoned for life continues to climb, even as the overall prison population declines.
Detained people walk through a pathway inside the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, in 2019.
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Earlier this week, President Donald Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act, named for a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student killed by a migrant from Venezuela who had entered the U.S. illegally. The bill makes it easier to detain, and in some cases to deport, migrants accused of certain crimes, including burglary, theft, shoplifting and assaulting a police officer.
In November, Jose Ibarra was convicted on a total of 10 charges in Riley’s death, including murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated assault with intent to rape, and tampering with evidence. But despite the heated political rhetoric that erupted in the wake of Riley’s violent murder, a Georgia prosecutor chose not to seek the death penalty — instead opting for life without parole.
Ibarra is now among more than 56,000 people serving life without parole in the U.S., a population that has increased by more than 68% since 2003. That’s according to a report released last month by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates against extreme sentencing in the U.S. Over that same period of time, the overall number of people incarcerated has remained roughly the same, and the incarceration rate has dropped, suggesting that those serving life without parole make up an increasingly large share of the prison population.
Every few years, The Sentencing Project looks at exactly who is serving life without parole, life, and what the group terms “virtual life” — what researchers deem sentences so lengthy, the prisoner will likely die behind bars. These groups make up a growing population that researcher Ashley Nellis, now a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., has been studying for more than 15 years. In addition to those who can never be paroled, there are more than 97,000 prisoners serving parole-eligible life sentences and at least 41,000 serving “virtual life.”
Use of the death penalty has declined drastically in the U.S., but that alone does not explain the growth of life and life-without-parole sentencing, Nellis said.
People convicted of homicides represented about 56% of the population serving life without parole as of 2024, data shows. But a significant portion of those serving “death by incarceration” sentences were convicted of offenses such as robbery, burglary or drug crimes under habitual offender laws in many states.
They include people like Mark Jones, featured in a 2021 Marshall Project article and documentary with Frontline about the large number of incarcerated people in Florida who are locked up for life. Jones, a former West Point cadet struggling with PTSD and alcoholism, was sentenced to life in prison after an attempted carjacking, because of one of Florida’s many habitual offender laws.
Many of those laws were born out of the “tough-on-crime” movement in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to high crime rates. But the consequences often outlive the initial panic, and the racial disparities in who gets sentenced to life are often glaring, Nellis said.
Data shows that half of all people serving life sentences are Black, and people sentenced to life without parole experience the most significant racial disparities.
It’s also a population that is aging, Nellis said. A study she authored in 2022 found almost half of people serving life without parole were 50 or older, and one in four was at least 60 years old. And, as John Simerman explained in a 2021 TMP article, this graying population costs states like Louisiana a lot of money.
One criticism of life-without-parole sentencing is that prisoners facing that punishment have access to fewer legal protections than those with death sentences — and it can be nearly impossible to get a wrongful conviction overturned for those serving life. That’s why two of the 37 federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted in December by then-President Joe Biden refused to sign paperwork accepting clemency, and instead filed emergency motions in federal court to block the action.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, both incarcerated in the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, argued in court filings that having their sentences commuted would put them at a legal disadvantage while continuing to appeal their cases, based on claims of innocence.
In instances where someone receives the death penalty, courts must evaluate them using heightened constitutional protections because of the life-and-death stakes of the outcome. There is no such legal requirement for those locked up for life.
