Changing the Knowledge Base and Public Perception of Long‐Term Prisoners

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12135
• Date: 01 May 2015
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Author: Marc Mauer

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

FORGOTTEN PRISONERS

Changing the Knowledge Base and Public

Perception of Long-Term Prisoners

Marc Mauer

The Sentencing Project

Several decades ago, I spent a good deal of time with a self-help group of men serving

life sentences in a Michigan prison. Many of their personal stories of transformation

were quite compelling. One of the men as a 20-year-old had participated in an armed

robbery. By the time I got to knowhim, he had become a 40-year-old who was saving some

of his earnings from work in the prison kitchen to make a modest monthly donation to

Save the Children, an international organization focused on giving children a healthy life

with the opportunity to learn and be protected from violence. In his mind, that donation

was a small way to pay back the larger community for the harm he had done, and one that

stood in sharp contrast to the lack of such options in the prison environment.

In their argument for “the imperative” of including lifers and long-term prisoners in

both research and policy discussions, Kazemian and Travis (2015, this issue) point to the

disturbing situation whereby this population has been largely ignored in discussions about

mass incarceration. Governmentdata have long been lacking on the size and demographics of

this population, and only in recent years have we begun to receive detailed analyses compiled

by nonprofit organizations (in particular, The Sentencing Project and the American Civil

Liberties Union).

The overall figures are striking. One of every nine people in prison today is serving a

life sentence. Nearly one third of this group are serving terms of life without the possibility

of parole, and of those who are parole eligible, politically driven decisions have frequently

resulted in excessively lengthy periods in prison before release. The implications of these

figures both for addressing mass incarceration and for human rights concerns are profound.

Kazemian and Travis (2015) first document how little we know about the experience

of lifers in prison, including the physical or psychological impact of imprisonment over a

period of many decades behind bars, and to what extent prison serves either a rehabilitative

Direct correspondence to Marc Mauer, The Sentencing Project, 1705 DeSales St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036

(e-mail: mauer@sentencingproject.org).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12135 C2015 American Society of Criminology 351

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 14 rIssue 2