“…To make the overall argument, this article draws on a case study conducted in California in 2014, which is summarized and situated within the broader literature on LWOP. With some rare exceptions (Leigey, 2015; Vannier, 2016), most of the empirical works that explore LWOP’s severity stem from prisoners (Hassine, 2010) or policy reports (Nellis, 2017). Historical (Seeds, 2018), sociological (Appleton and Grøver, 2007) and legal works on LWOP (Steiker and Steiker, 2012), regularly underline that the punishment denies the hope of ever being released to a number of individuals, including African Americans and Latinos, juveniles, the elderly and the mentally ill (Nellis, 2013).…”