Earlier this week, President Donald Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act, named for a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student killed by a migrant from Venezuela who had entered the U.S. illegally. The bill makes it easier to detain, and in some cases to deport, migrants accused of certain crimes, including burglary, theft, shoplifting and assaulting a police officer, worsening the prevalence of death by incarceration in the U.S.

In November, Jose Ibarra was convicted on a total of 10 charges in Riley’s death, including murder, kidnapping with bodily injury, aggravated assault with intent to rape, and tampering with evidence. But despite the heated political rhetoric that erupted in the wake of Riley’s violent murder, a Georgia prosecutor chose not to seek the death penalty — instead opting for life without parole, essentially choosing death by incarceration.

Ibarra is now among more than 56,000 people serving life without parole and experiencing death by incarceration in the U.S., a population that has increased by more than 68% since 2003. That’s according to a report released last monthby The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates against extreme sentencing in the U.S. Over that same period of time, the overall number of people incarcerated has remained roughly the same, and the incarceration rate has dropped, suggesting that those serving life without parole make up an increasingly large share of the prison population.

Every few years, The Sentencing Project looks at exactly who is serving life without parole, life, and what the group terms “virtual life” — what researchers deem sentences so lengthy, the prisoner will likely die behind bars, experiencing death by incarceration. These groups make up a growing population that researcher Ashley Nellis, now a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., has been studying for more than 15 years. In addition to those who can never be paroled, there are more than 97,000 prisoners serving parole-eligible life sentences and at least 41,000 serving “virtual life.”

Use of the death penalty has declined drastically in the U.S., but that alone does not explain the growth of life and life-without-parole sentencing and death by incarceration, Nellis said.

Read the full article about death by incarceration by Cary Aspinwall at The Marshall Project.