By Ashley Nellis

Extreme punishments, including the death penalty and life imprisonment, are a hallmark of the United States’ harsh criminal legal system. Nationwide one of every 15 women in prison — over 6,600 women — are serving a sentence of life with parole, life without parole, or a virtual life sentence of 50 years or more. The nearly 2,000 women serving life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences can expect to die in prison. Death sentences are permitted by 27 states and the federal government, and currently 52 women sit on death row. This report presents new data on the prevalence of both of these extreme sentences imposed on women. Across the U.S. there are nearly 2,000 women serving life-without-parole (LWOP) sentences and another 52 women who have been sentenced to death. The majority have been convicted of homicide. Regarding capital punishment, women are sitting on death row in 15 states. Women are serving LWOP sentences in all but six states. Three quarters of life sentences are concentrated in 12 states and the federal system. It is notable that in all states with a high count of women serving LWOP, there is at least one woman on death row as well. Two exceptions to the overlap are Colorado and Michigan which do not have anyone serving a death sentence because it is not statutorily allowed.

Brooklyn: National Black Women's Justice Initiative, 2021,

By Marion Vannier and Ashley Nellis

This paper considers the pains of life-sentence imprisonment through the novel vantage point of old age understood as a process. Our prison populations are getting older and the use of life sentences is dramatically increasing. Yet, research, campaigning, law and policy have not addressed the long-term consequences of imposing life sentences on prisoners who will age. Whilst far from exhaustive, our study draws on studies in gerontology, health policy and penology. We rely on shared analysis of collected official data from the US and the UK to highlight how the expansion and growth of life sentences on the one hand, and the dramatic aging of the prison population, on the other, are intertwined and need to be considered together. This article emphasizes the urgency of taking a holistic approach to penal severity, one that includes analyses of scale, lived experiences, as well as of law and politics, to uncover the multiple forms of marginalization elderly prisoners are exposed to. Aging is a phenomenon we will all experience, yet, in the context of imprisonment, we argue that old age is a ‘prison problem’ rather than a ‘prisoner problem,’, urging research and policy to depart from the conventional and reductive view of the older prisoner as one in need of transformation and treatment or as being inherently criminal

Punishment & Society 1–22 © The Author(s) 2023

By Ashley Nellis

Before America’s era of mass incarceration took hold in the early 1970s, the number of individuals in prison was less than 200,000. Today, it’s 1.4 million; and more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every seven in prison. More people are sentenced to life in prison in America than there were people in prison serving any sentence in 1970. Nearly five times the number of people are now serving life sentences in the United States as were in 1984, a rate of growth that has outpaced even the sharp expansion of the overall prison population during this period. The now commonplace use of life imprisonment contradicts research on effective public safety strategies, exacerbates already extreme racial injustices in the criminal justice system, and exemplifies the egregious consequences of mass incarceration. In 2020, The Sentencing Project obtained official corrections data from all states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to produce our 5th national census on life imprisonment.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2021. 46p.