Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (EIN 27-3761788) is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
A Decade After Montgomery v. Louisiana: Progress, Gaps, and the Promise of Meaningful Review for Children Serving Extreme Sentences
Published January 23, 2025 the report A Decade After Montgomery v. Louisiana: Progress, Gaps, and the Promise of Meaningful Review for Children Serving Extreme Sentences examines the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2016 decision.
How You Can Help During the COVID-19 Crisis
How You Can Help During the COVID-19 Crisis
Regardless of background, resources or personal identity, we are all living through a time of great uncertainty and anxiety. In some ways, this pandemic has been called an equalizer — a shared experience with a common goal to come out stronger and healthier than ever. And yet, this crisis disproportionately impacts communities of color, low-income and poor people, and those without the protective factors of stable housing, employment, and established networks. People in prison and those who are home but have enduring criminal records are facing challenges to a degree and scale few of us can imagine.
Like us at the CFSY, you are probably seeking opportunities to be and feel helpful, to give to those who have less, and to mitigate the economic impact of this crisis in your own communities. For more than a year the CFSY has focused efforts through our Community Prosperity Initiative to form diverse partnerships with the business community to support members of our Incarcerated Children’s Advocacy Network (ICAN). Now more than ever our ICAN members and others being released from prison across the country need our support, compassion, and most importantly, resources.
Every day we’re hearing stories of ICAN members being laid off, having to make impossible decisions to pay rent or buy food, and struggling with the retraumatization of social isolation and constrained physical movement. After being thrown away by the criminal legal system as children, and spending decades in prison, this may in fact be the most challenging of times for ICAN members. And for those still serving extreme sentences, prisons have become a ticking time bomb due to overcrowded and unresourced conditions.
Please join our partners including Lyft, Starbucks, Verizon, and Google in providing concrete and immediate resources to some of the most vulnerable members of society during this crisis.
Most Urgent Needs:
- Free or discounted mental health counseling
- Gift cards to grocery stores and online food/supply sites
- Equipment (phones, laptops, tablets, iPads) for virtual connection, online shopping and job searching
- Subsidized or discounted phone and internet plans
- Interest-free short-term loans to individuals
- Contributions to commissary accounts so those still in prison can purchase soap, hand sanitizer, and food
For more information, and to support our ICAN members during this critical time, please email Anna Melbin at [email protected].
And please, however you choose to help and get involved, keep top of mind those who are most marginalized and therefore disproportionately impacted during and after this pandemic. Help ensure equitable responses by prioritizing people of color, and others who have been systematically barred from the social and economic resources needed to weather this storm.
From all of us at the CFSY to you, your families and communities, we wish you health and safety. And we thank you for your support.
Cyntoia Brown Granted Clemency
Today, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announced he had granted clemency to Cyntoia Brown, who has been serving a life sentence since killing her abuser when she was 16. CFSY Youth Justice Advocate Eric Alexander released the following statement:
I am very proud of my home state of Tennessee today after our Governor’s decision to grant clemency to Cyntoia Brown. A victim of sex trafficking, she was given life in prison for a crime she committed as a teen. Cyntoia’s much-deserved clemency should serve as a reminder and example of the need for systemic change to our justice system so that young people who come in conflict with the law are held accountable in age-appropriate ways with a focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society.
I say this as someone who, like Cyntoia, once faced a lifetime in the Tennessee Department of Corrections for a crime I committed as a teen. There are thousands of us across the country, but most don’t have celebrity advocates. We are the only country in the world that sentences our children to life without parole. The majority of the people serving these sentences experienced violence in their communities as children. I hope Cyntoia’s story will open the eyes of our country and serve as a rallying cry to end the extreme sentencing of youth once and for all.
Additional coverage can be found at The Tennesseean.
Washington State Supreme Court Rules Life Without Parole for Children Unconstitutional
The landmark decision makes Washington the 21st state (plus DC) to ban the sentence, meaning a majority of states now ban or do not use it
October 18, 2018, Washington, DC –– Today, the Washington State Supreme Court handed down a decision in State of Washington v. Brian Bassett, in which it ruled that sentencing children to life without the possibility of parole is unconstitutional, thereby banning this inhumane sentence in that state. (Read an amicus brief filed by the Juvenile Law Center with input from the CFSY here).
Washington is now the 21st state, plus the District of Columbia, to ban sentencing children to life without parole — in 2012, only five states banned the practice. For the first time in history, a majority of states ban or do not use life without parole for children. Included in that majority are “blue” and “red” states alike, such as Arkansas, Utah, Nevada, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and California. The United States Supreme Court has also stepped to limit this practice three times since 2010.
The Washington State Supreme Court recognized this momentum in its opinion, in which it found that “states are rapidly abandoning juvenile life without parole sentences, children are less criminally culpable than adults, and the characteristics of youth do not support the penological goals of a life without parole sentence.” Nearly a dozen people told as children they would die in prison in Washington are now eligible to be resentenced.
“We’re thrilled that children sentenced to life without parole in Washington now have hope of a second chance and that Washington has joined the ever-growing number of states that have abandoned the barbaric practice of sentencing our children to die in prison,” says Jody Kent Lavy, executive director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “This national trend reflects an emerging consensus that our children who commit serious crimes should be held accountable in more age-appropriate ways that focus on rehabilitation and reintegration into society.”
Brian Bassett was a homeless sixteen-year-old when he was sentenced to life without parole in 1995. At his original trial, the judge called Bassett, still a child, “a walking advertisement” for the death penalty. Eventually, his case made its way to the Washington Court of Appeals which decided in favor of Bassett, a decision which was held by the Washington Supreme Court today. The Court of Appeals deemed it too risky to label a child “irreparably corrupt,” saying “given the difficulty even expert psychologists have in determining whether a person is irreparably corrupt and the extremely high stakes of the decision… this type of discretion produces unacceptable risk that children undeserving of a life without parole sentence will receive one.”
For more information, or if you would like to speak with Jody Kent Lavy or legal director Heather Renwick, please contact Karmah Elmusa at [email protected] | 202-289-4677 ext. 113.
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The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth is a national coalition that leads, coordinates, develops and supports efforts to implement fair and age-appropriate sentences for youth.
Congressman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) introduces bill to end JLWOP in federal criminal justice system
The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY) applauds Congressman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) for championing HR 6011, which would end life-without-parole and de facto life sentences for children in the federal criminal justice system and bring the country in line with most of the world in repudiating these draconian sentences for kids.
The use of extreme sentences on children, like life without the possibility of release or parole, ignores what adolescent development research has documented and every parent knows: Children are not the same as adults. Drawing in part on research demonstrating that children possess less capacity than adults to control their impulses, think through the long-term consequences of their actions, or avoid pressure from peers and adults, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that children should not be subject to our country’s most extreme punishments.
“This legislation does not guarantee release. Instead, it provides the opportunity for a rehabilitated individual whose crime was committed in his or her youth and who has served a minimum of 20 years to have a sentence reviewed by a judge to determine whether a second chance is merited,” Westerman said. “I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for joining with me in this effort to provide the opportunity for a second chance for individuals who strayed from the law during adolescence.”
Congressman Westerman’s bill comes one year after his home state of Arkansas passed legislation banning life-without-parole from being used on children there. That legislation, now titled Act 539, impacted more than 100 people in the state and received broad bi-partisan support in the legislature. In addition to Arkansas, nineteen other states and the District of Columbia prohibit children from being sentenced to die in prison. Over the last five years, the number of states that ban these inhumane sentences has quadrupled, with conservative states like Arkansas, North Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia leading the way.
U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has a similar provision to protect children from being condemned to die in prison in the Sentencing Reform and Correction Act (S. 1917). The CFSY worked closely with both Senator Grassley and Congressman Westerman on the legislation.
“We’re grateful that the inhumane practice of sentencing children to die in prison is being addressed at the federal level through the leadership of Congressman Westerman of Arkansas,” says Jody Kent Lavy, executive director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. “Arkansas is among a rapidly growing number of states reforming their youth sentencing laws to ensure that all children have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are more than their worst acts and deserve second chances. This bill is a reflection of our belief that there is no such thing as a throwaway child and that no child should be sentenced to die in prison.”
HR 6011 will ensure that children sentenced in the federal system have the opportunity to petition a judge to review their sentence after they have served 20-25 years in prison. Impacted individuals will be afforded counsel at each of their review hearings – a maximum of 3 – where the judge will consider, among other factors, their demonstrated maturity, rehabilitation, and fitness to re-enter society. HR 6011 does not guarantee an individual’s release, but will ensure that children prosecuted and convicted of serious crimes in the federal system are afforded an opportunity to demonstrate whether they are deserving of a second chance.