When Yusef Qualls-El was 17, a judge sentenced him to life behind bars. It was the mid-1990s, an era when the prison population exploded. Thousands of minors like Qualls-El received sentences of life without parole and entered prison at an age when their peers were going to college or starting their careers. Inside prison, education is often reserved for those who will soon return to society. As a result, those who were seen as the least likely to get out had the fewest opportunities. Now, as courts and lawmakers have begun to rethink extreme sentencing policies for young people, thousands of those sentenced to spend their lives in prison are getting out. People who went to prison as teenagers are being released as middle-aged men and women, reports Open Campus and the Washington Post. Building a living-wage career — let alone going to school — often seems out of reach for people like Qualls-El, a 44-year-old with a criminal history and no formal education beyond a GED. He earned his commercial drivers license after completing driver training.
After he was resentenced in 2022, Qualls-El was still told no when he wanted to enroll in college. He didn’t have enough time left on his sentence to finish a degree. “I’ve spent 27-plus years plus in prison, hoping to get some sort of education, but wasn’t allowed, because of how much time I had left,” Qualls-El said. “Now I have too little time.” Between 1995 and 2017, 11,600 individuals serving life without the possibility of parole were under 26 at the time of their sentence, according to The Sentencing Project. Two-thirds were Black. And thousands more teenagers and young adults were handed down sentences so long that they would die behind bars. Things began to change as courts began to consider research that showed young people’s brains are not the same as older adults. Following a series of Supreme Court decisions between 2005 and 2016 that found juvenile life without parole was cruel and unusual, states began changing sentencing guidelines that automatically sent young people to prison for life. In 2016, the court ruled that those new guidelines should be applied retroactively, opening the door for juvenile lifers like Qualls-El to be resentenced. Now, more than half of states have banned life sentences without the possibility of parole for people under 18.
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