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

自20世纪70年代初以来，不得假释无期徒刑(LWOP)--一种极端的监禁刑罚，即被判刑事犯罪的人在自然生活期间没有资格获得行政释放--在美国已成为一种常规的法律制裁和刑事实践。然而，尽管LWOP是美国惩罚的一个正常且不断扩大的部分，但它是如何变成这样的，并没有得到仔细的阐述或解释。这个项目调查了LWOP的崛起和沿着几条路线的持续扩张。首先，该项目考察了无期徒刑在美国的历史用法，以此来确定LWOP的独特之处。其次，该项目分析了LWOP的当前使用情况、会期法律中的图表模式以及50个州和联邦系统的量刑统计数据。第三，该项目使用比较的州级案例研究来询问现有的假设，这些假设将LWOP的出现归因于废除死刑的努力或大规模监禁政策：该项目借鉴立法历史、司法先例、行政记录、媒体报道和档案材料，探索导致制裁的时间、目标和强度不同的州级条件和决定。

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.