“…Finally, greater research attention to life and LWOP sentences is needed, in part, because of their burgeoning popularity in American penal culture, which raises a host of broader moral and philosophical concerns. An important body of legal scholarship has argued that LWOP sentences are arbitrary, capricious, and overly harsh (Appleton & Grover, 2007;Gottschalk, 2013;Henry, 2015;Kazemian & Travis, 2015;Leigey & Schartmueller, 2019;Seeds, 2021). Other work has highlighted their perverse impacts on shifting age and mortality rates in penal institutions (Porter et al, 2016), emphasizing that "the pains of imprisonment are significantly heightened" for "life sentences" (van Zyl Smit & Appleton, 2019, p. x).…”