Doctoral Dissertation Research: Life Without Parole: Emergence of a Late 20th Century American Punishment

自20世纪70年代初以来，无假释可能性的终身监禁（LWOP）-一种极端的监禁刑罚，根据这种刑罚，被判犯有刑事罪的人在自然生活期间没有资格获得行政释放-已成为美国的一种常规法律的制裁和刑事做法。然而，尽管LWOP是美国惩罚的一个正常和不断扩大的部分，但它是如何成为这样的却没有得到仔细的阐述或解释。本项目调查LWOP的崛起和沿着几条路线的持续扩张。首先，该项目考察了美国终身监禁的历史用途，作为确定LWOP独特性的一种手段。其次，该项目分析了LWOP的当前使用情况，绘制了50个州和联邦系统的开庭法律和判刑统计数据的图表。第三，该项目使用比较国家一级的案例研究，询问现有的假设，属性LWOP的出现死刑废除的努力或大规模监禁政策：从立法历史，司法先例，行政记录，媒体报道和档案材料绘制，该项目探讨了国家一级的条件和决定负责制裁的时间，目标和强度的差异。

Since the early 1970s, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) -- an extreme prison sentence under which a person convicted of a criminal offense is ineligible for administrative release during natural life -- has emerged as a routine legal sanction and penal practice in the United States. Yet while LWOP is a normal and expanding part of American punishment, just how it came to be so has not been carefully articulated or explained. This project investigates LWOP's rise and continued expansion along several lines. First, the project examines historical uses of life sentencing in America as a means of identifying how LWOP is unique. Second, the project analyzes LWOP's current use, charting patterns in session laws and sentencing statistics across the fifty states and the federal system. Third, the project uses comparative state-level case studies to interrogate existing hypotheses that attribute LWOP's emergence to death penalty abolition efforts or mass incarceration policies: drawing from legislative history, judicial precedent, executive records, media coverage, and archival material, the project explores the state-level conditions and decisions responsible for differences in the sanction's timing, target, and intensity.