There’s no organized movement, but there’s a debate.
A majority of states still have the death penalty on their books, so that campaign is far from over. But prisoner advocates are also turning their attention to life sentences.
Lifers constitute no small number of prisoners. “According to The Sentencing Project, more than 200,000 people are serving … life without parole, life with parole, or virtual life sentences—in which someone is sentenced to 50 years or more. They represent one out of seven people in prison, and there are 22 times more people serving life without parole than the population of people awaiting death,” Mother Jones says (read article here).
Critics argue that “life without parole has many of the same qualities that make the death penalty so abhorrent. Capital punishment is riddled with racial disparities, junk science, and a legal system that routinely fails the marginalized.” Shari Silberstein of Equal Justice USA, a criminal justice nonprofit, told Mother Jones, “I would not call it a humane alternative to the death penalty.”
It does, however, have an advantage the death penalty lacks: If someone was wrongfully convicted, they can be freed. That doesn’t give them back the years they spent behind bars, but it gives them back the rest of their life.
There are people in our jails we don’t want freed. Who cares if Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski aren’t enjoying life in ADX?
Certainly, the racial disparities and other flaws of the criminal justice system should be fixed. But that’s a separate issue from whether awful people should stay in jail. Innocent, decent people will lose sleep in they didn’t.