The past 40 years have been a time of great change in life sentencing, during which the use of life sentences has dramatically grown and the quality of life sentences has markedly hardened. The rise of life without parole in the United States is a particularly recognizable development, but life sentencing has increased worldwide, and the use of other forms of punishment that hold people in prison until death has also intensified. This article focuses on these transformations by examining several important areas in which thinking and scholarship on life sentencing have been altered and spurred by recent developments. The review concludes by pointing to gaps in the field of research and highlighting issues on which social scientific research on life sentencing has more to contribute going forward.

Scholars now recognize life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) as a defining feature of contemporary American punishment. As LWOP becomes topical, it draws attention to a significant, more general phenomenon: the growth of state-sanctioned policies and practices by which prisoners face the remainder of their lives in prison. This article seeks to expand perspectives on contemporary punishment by looking closely at how lifetime incarceration took shape historically in different political projects and penal systems. Drawing from primary materials and a comprehensive review of secondary historical literature, I examine modes of perpetual penal confinement: combinations of sanctions and practices that result in holding people in state custody permanently. Interpreting classic penological paradigms anew, the article illuminates the significant role that perpetual confinement has played in influential theories of criminal justice and shows how it has proved a versatile tool for social control and prison administration across diverse penal schemes, largely because of its unique temporal character. The article concludes with a diagnosis of contemporary American punishment, suggesting that LWOP—beyond being a cruel and exclusionary penalty—is symptomatic of a system in which imprisonment until death has become uniquely ordinary.

Sentences of life imprisonment without a prospect of adequate review and release are prohibited in States party to the European Convention on Human Rights. Should the same principle apply when extradition is sought to States not party to the Convention? In Sanchez Sanchez v United Kingdom (2022), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights applied a less strict standard for potential extraditees facing life without parole. We analyse this decision and its repercussions in light of the history of international cooperation in extreme punishment cases between Europe and the USA and recent interpretations of the new standard. The article concludes with an assessment of the level of proof litigants must present to satisfy the Sanchez Sanchez test and of how the law could continue to prevent inhuman and degrading treatment of extraditees facing life sentences.

The prison is often discussed as an institution that imposes death, be it physical, social, or spiritual death. Resistance to prison, likewise, is often depicted through processes that affirm life—in “acts of living”, such as creating strong peer networks, developing daily routines and practices of self-care, collective organizing inside or outside the prison or, more generally, actively hoping for and working toward release from prison. For some, however, resistance centers not only on life, but on death—seeking to control one’s death, fighting against death as it is imposed by the system, or making efforts to die on one’s own terms. Drawing on extensive interviews with older people living with chronic illness in 11 prisons in a US State, including a prison hospice in the State, this article examines ways in which incarcerated people approach death by choosing to die in ways that have meaning to them. We examine how incarcerated people create alternative pathways for autonomy and community in the death process, through “everyday death resistances”, including refusing to accept prison medical care, strategizing to die on the mainline rather than in prison medical clinics, and finding a “good death” in hospice.