In a series of new audio stories, Futuro Media senior producer Julieta Martinelli will explore Tennessee’s juvenile lifer law, how it has been applied, how it could possibly change due to a pending Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, and how tough-on-crime legislation threatens to dismantle any progress.

Julieta will meet some of those 185 juveniles sentenced to life, currently incarcerated in Tennessee prisons. Over the next few months, she will explore the laws, the potential remedies and those at the heart of them. And she’ll learn how race, economic status, and even politics affect the possibility that they will ever have a chance at redemption, like hundreds of others already have across the country.

This reporting was conducted with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights.