It would be easy to skim the back cover of “This Life,” the vital, inventive new novel by Quntos KunQuest, glean the fact that the author has, for the past twenty-five years, been incarcerated at Angola prison, in Louisiana, for a carjacking committed when he was nineteen, and presume that […]
LWOP
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Gov. Ralph Northam is expected to sign probation reform legislation. Northam will attend the ceremony alongside Robert Rooks, the CEO of the Reform Alliance, an organization that aims to transform probation and parole legislation. The organization was started when rapper Meek Mill received a years-long sentence for a gun and […]
In a 6-3 vote, the conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted protections against sentencing kids to die in prison. The court ruled on Thursday that a judge does not need to find that a person under 18 who commits murder is “permanently incorrigible” before sentencing them to life in prison […]
Any day now, with Governor Ralph Northam’s signature, Virginia will eliminate the death penalty. The news is cause for celebration. Since 1976, Virginia has executed more people than any other state except Texas. Now, Virginia joins a growing wave of states that have rejected this punishment and chosen to make our criminal justice system […]
More than 200,000 women and girls are incarcerated in this country — 10,000 of them in federal prisons — and Danielle Metz used to be one of them. Metz was married to an alleged drug kingpin and had two small children, 3 and 7 years old, when she was sentenced […]
It’s never easy to admit you made a mistake. Twenty-five years ago, I made a serious mistake. At the start of my two terms as governor of Maryland, I announced that I would not grant parole to anyone with a life sentence, even though they were supposed to have a […]
More than two thirds of the roughly 203,000 prisoners serving life sentences in the United States are people of color, according to a new study citing official corrections data obtained last year from all states and the federal Bureau of Prisons. The study, released by the Sentencing Project, found that […]
