Please see my newest article at DIGBoston: Commonwealth Committed to “Other Death Penalty”–New report shows 1/6 of women in Mass prisons sentenced to life without parole.Angela Jefferson (left) and her daughter, Shanita. Photo courtesy of Families for Justice as Healing WEBSITE

It begins: “The fear of the unknown is what I feel every day,” Angela Jefferson writes. The note came in an email from MCI Framingham, where she has served “30 long years.”

Jefferson adds, “I get sad a lot of times when I think about all of the things that I could be doing out there in the world to give back. I look out the window to my room and see the cars passing by, but the thing that makes it depressing is the barbed wire that is wrapped around the fences.”

Jefferson is one of the 26 women out of 163 currently held at the oldest women’s prison in the country who are serving life without parole (LWOP). Parole does not mean a guarantee of release but offers a second chance, whereas LWOP is often called “the other death penalty.” (I previously wrote about this in 2019.)  MORE