The area of the greatest legislative change has centered on those the report terms “lifers.” The report cites in particular California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law, under which any felony following two previous convictions can result in a life sentence.

The study adds to new statistics that were recently documented on the boom in prison construction across the country over the last quarter century, a period when the prison population mushroomed to over 2 million, and humiliation and abuse of inmates by U.S. prison guards was rampant.

Of the 1.3 million men and women in state and federal prisons, more than 127,000 are now serving a life sentence. In 1992, just before William Clinton was elected president, the figure was around 70,000. Of this number, 26 percent are facing life in prison without the possibility of parole, a jump from 18 percent in 1992.

Seven states—Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—have more than 1,000 prisoners each serving sentences of life without parole. In six states—Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota—by law all life sentences are imposed without the possibility of parole. Prisoners in those states that don’t mandate a life sentence without parole don’t necessarily have a much better prospect of getting out. In Tennessee, for example, prisoners on a life sentence must serve 51 years before their request for parole can be considered.

The length of time lifers spent in prison jumped by 37 percent, from 21.2 to 29 years, between 1991 and 1997—most of which was during the two terms of the Clinton presidency.

The increase in the time each individual spends in prison helped fuel the unprecedented boom in prison construction over the last 25 years. Between 1979 and 2000, the Urban Institute reported in April in The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison Expansion, the number of state prisons alone increased from 592 to 1,023. The number of those locked up in city and county jails, and state and federal prisons, doubled to more than 2 million over the same period.

The state of New York has the highest rate in the country of those serving life sentences among all prisoners—nearly 20 percent, twice the national average. It is followed closely by Nevada, California, Alabama, and Massachusetts, all at between 17 and 19 percent. There are 28,807 men and women facing life sentences in California, more than twice the number of any other state. Florida has the highest number of those on a life sentence without the possibility of parole—4,478.

The report also links the use of the death penalty—reintroduced in 1976 by Supreme Court ruling—to the expanded use of life sentences. “Since sentencing systems are generally established on a proportional basis—more serious crimes are punished more severely,” it states, “the presence of the death penalty in the sentencing serves to exert upward pressure on the severity of penalties imposed for all offenses.”

While support for capital punishment, restricted rights of appeal and parole, and stiffer penalties in general is widely attributed to the Bush administration and the Republican Party, the liberal media hardly mention the equally horrendous record of the Democrats in boosting these weapons of class terror.

The Clinton-Gore administration, for example, was responsible for two major federal laws expanding the death penalty: the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act, which made some 60 additional federal offenses punishable by death; and the 1996 Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (even the name speaks volumes!), which further restricted federal court appeal rights of those in state prisons.  
 
 
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