John Pace and His Friends Expected to Die in Prison

Not one of the more than 130 released juvenile lifers in the state of Pennsylvania has reoffended, according to records kept by Brooke McCarthy of Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit law firm. This fits with the statistics: People convicted of homicide are actually very unlikely to reoffend, especially decades later. When more than 100 lifers were released in Maryland in an unrelated 2012 federal-court decision, not one committed a new felony by 2016. And when California paroled 860 convicted murderers from 1995 to 2010, just five were convicted of a new felony by 2011, and none of murder.

This is one of the reasons Juvenile Law Center tracks the cohort’s success. “Our hope is that if that does unfortunately happen, we will have tracked enough people to show that it’s an anomaly,” said McCarthy.