New Mexico Has Lost Track of Juveniles Locked Up for Life. We Found Nearly Two Dozen.
ProPublica, March 10, 2023: New Mexico Has Lost Track of Juveniles Locked Up for Life. We Found Nearly Two Dozen.
“The New Mexico Corrections Department has lost track of nearly two dozen prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, an error that could keep these ‘juvenile lifers’ from getting a chance at freedom under a bill likely to be passed by the state Legislature within days.
“As the legislation was being drafted, ProPublica asked the department for a list of all state prisoners who were sentenced to life as juveniles. Using court records, the news organization then identified at least 21 such individuals not on the state’s list. Many of them had been locked up for decades.
“Denali Wilson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who helped discover the problem, said such carelessness on the part of the state government makes it plain that ‘when you throw away kids in adult prison, they are lost.’
“Or as one of the forgotten prisoners, Sigmundr Odhinnson, told ProPublica in an email from behind bars, ‘We are, quite literally, missing children.’”
Additional reading:
The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth
Source NM, January 30, 2023: Second Chance bill has better chances to pass than in previous years
Medium, April 30, 2020: New Study Finds 1% Recidivism Rate Among Released Philly Juvenile Lifers
