Every Wednesday evening at the Macomb Correctional Facility, a prison thirty minutes north of Detroit, ten men leave their cells to congregate around a table and talk about poetry. For two hours, in a white-walled, cinder-block room, they read works of literature (most recently, George Jackson’s “Soledad Brother”), debate postcolonial feminism and alternative philosophies of education, and discuss their own writing. The weekly session, organized by a grassroots educational collective called the Hamtramck Free School, is called “Writer’s Block.”
Some members of the group, now in their thirties and forties, were convicted of murder before they turned eighteen, and sentenced to mandatory life without parole. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for juveniles is unconstitutional and violates the Eighth Amendment. Now, a juvenile’s home environment and family must be taken into account before sentencing to life without parole.
Following the decision, the Supreme Court allowed individual states to decide whether to apply the ruling retroactively; the states of Alabama, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania decided to uphold all prior sentences. Michigan has more than three hundred and sixty juvenile lifers currently serving sentences, the second-highest number in the country, after Pennsylvania. Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a new case, which is expected to determine whether the Court's ruling from 2012 should be applied to all past sentences. Across the nation, the decision could allow more than two thousand individuals currently serving life-without-parole sentences to renegotiate their cases.
