Lifers who aren't

California Gov. Jerry Brown says the release of nearly 1,400 lifers from state prison over the last three years has nothing to do with federal court demands that the state reduce its prison population. The releases, the governor's office claims, reflect the new legal landscape and have nothing to do with trying to get the inmate numbers down.
Still, Brown's approval of the release of 82 percent of those lifers -- mostly murderers recommended for release by the state parole board -- is stirring controversy, especially among victims' rights advocates.
These convicts are not people coming off death row or those sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which seems a more reasonable and certainly less costly alternative to California's broken capital punishment system. Those being released were sentenced with the condition that they might some day be freed. Some day for most comes after serving an average of 27 years.
The fear is that once you've killed you'll kill again, however that fear doesn't seem to square with the facts. A 2013 recidivism study by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation found that paroled lifers "have a markedly lower return to prison recidivism rate than non‐lifer parolees (13.3 vs. 65.1 percent, respectively)." In a Stanford University study tracing 860 murderers paroled between 1990 and 2010, only five committed new crimes and none were convicted of murder.
All things being equal, we'd probably be better off paroling murderers than robbers and burglars. But then when it comes to murder, all things are not equal. The average 27 years a lifer spends in prison is a long time, but for the friends and families of victims, 27 years will never be long enough.