Here Are All the Countries Where Children are Sentenced to Die in Prison Saki Knafo - The Huffington Post
go to original September 21, 2013

There are about 2,500 youth offenders serving life sentences without the possibility of parole in prisons worldwide. We've come up with a map showing all of the countries where they are incarcerated.

That's right: The United States is the only country in the world that condemns people to spend their lives behind bars for crimes they committed before they turned 18.

A new report from the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for prison reforms, highlights this fact.

Ashley Nellis, one of the authors of the report, argued that the United States has a “very strange perception of justice and of youth who misbehave.”

“Unlike other countries, we fail to acknowledge their youthfulness and often other factors that contribute to their crimes,” like poverty and childhood abuse, she said.

According to the report, life sentences for all offenders are on the rise across the country, and the population of people serving life without the possibility of parole is growing especially fast, with an increase from 40,174 in 2008 to 49,081 to 2012.

The concept of a life sentence without parole originated in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and continues to be practiced almost exclusively by former British colonies, according to Alison Parker, the U.S. director for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. In the U.S., it became popular in the 1980s and 1990s, as politicians vied to portray themselves as “tough on crime.”

“Many Latin American countries, countries in Eastern Europe and in Asia don’t have the sentence as a possibility in any part of their penal code,” said Parker. “They may have death sentences, but they don’t have the sentence that you can die in prison.”

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

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