Monday, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court limited the practice of locking up juveniles for life when they haven’t committed murder. The court ruled in the case of Terrance Graham, who was 17 when he was implicated in a series of armed robberies and subsequently sentenced to life in prison. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, even the prosecutor did not recommend life without parole. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who five years ago voted to outlaw the death penalty for killers under 18, wrote the majority opinion.

The Justice Department reported that no 13-year-old has been given life without parole for non-homicides in a decade. The more than 2,000 juveniles who are currently serving life sentences for killing someone were not affected by the court’s ruling.

While life sentences with no chance of parole are unusual for juveniles who have been tried as adults and convicted of crimes other than killing, three-dozen states still allow for the possibility of life sentences. Vermont and Kansas provide statutory provisions for trying children as young as 10 years old in adult criminal court. 60% of juveniles in Florida’s prisons, like Graham, are locked up for life for crimes other than homicide. Pennsylvania has the highest total number of juvenile lifers. Only Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Oregon prohibit sentencing minors to life without a chance for parole.

According to Frontline report, there has been little extensive research into the impact of laws making it easier to try kids as adults. But existing studies indicate that the get-tough approach has had little or no effect on the rate of juvenile crime. Two studies that examined whether trying juveniles as adults resulted in lowered juvenile crime rates found that there was no evidence to support that the laws had the intended effect.

Two additional large-scale studies indicated that juveniles who receive harsher penalties when tried as adults tended to reoffend sooner and more often than those treated in the juvenile system. A 1996 Florida study found that youth transferred to adult prisons had a nearly 30% higher recidivism rate than youth who stayed in the juvenile system. Given the hardcore clientele in most adult prisons, this statistic should come as no surprise.

In a second 7-2 ruling, the court upheld a federal law that allows for the indefinite imprisonment of inmates considered mentally ill and “sexually dangerous,” regardless of whether their sentences have been served. Under the current law, authorities must persuade a federal judge that continued imprisonment is necessary and also must try to transfer prisoners to state control.

The argument before the high court was not whether Graham was innocent or that he was seeking freedom now, but whether he deserved to someday make a case before the state parole board.

So what do you think? Should juveniles be locked up for life without parole for crimes other than murder? And should sex offenders who have served their sentence be released regardless of whether they’re deemed to be dangerous?