Assessing California’s Response to the Supreme Court’s Rejection of Life in Prison without Parole for Juvenile Offenders

ABSTRACT

In the last decade and a half, the Supreme Court has decided a number of cases affecting juvenile sentencing and curtailing serious punishments for juveniles. These cases culminated in the Court declaring unconstitutional the sentencing of juvenile offenders to life without the possibility of parole. For those juveniles previously sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, these decisions mandated that states provide these offenders with meaningful opportunities for release. This paper assesses the implementation of the state of California’s legislative response to the Court’s rulings. Specifically, we examine the extent to which youthful offender parole boards in California consider the developmental factors noted by the Supreme Court in their decisions. Our results show that the aspects of the criminal offense and the “hallmark features of youth” were found not to influence parole decisions. In contrast, several aspects of the prisoner’s growth and maturation in prison were related to parole release. Thus, it appears that the parole boards are operating as instructed by the Supreme Court. Implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Parole
• punishment
• reentry/reintegration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Variance Inflation Factors (V.I.F.) were examined for all models. The only slightly problematic issue was between first-degree and second-degree murder, which had V.I.F.s of 3.5 and 3.6 respectively. The models were rerun eliminating second-degree murder as a predictor and the results were essentially identical.

2. See Appendix A for a correlation matrix of the examined variables. The highest correlations between the risk assessment instrument and the various measures were .55 with the growth/maturity variable, −.50 with the treatment/programming measure, .45 with the number of serious disciplinary infractions and −.44 with the years since the last serious disciplinary infraction, indicating moderate relationships between these factors at the bivariate level.

3. The sample size was limited for very practical reasons including the rather substantial difficulty of obtaining these transcripts as we were limited to requesting only a few per month. In addition, mistakes sometimes occurred requiring us to reinitiate the request and taking more time.