The United States Sentencing Commission considers a de facto life sentence to be anything over 39 years and two months. (This refers to people sentenced to life with parole, life without parole, de facto life, and the death penalty.) Lifers are already ineligible for many if not most of the best-paying jobs, because they can’t go to work-release camps. They call a prison like this one a time-building prison, and they’re the worst prisons. The education director at the prison then turned me down saying, You have a fresh life sentence.