As of April 15, 2022, I have spent 12,075 days behind bars for a 1989 crime I was convicted of committing at age 15. It would be the first and only arrest during my childhood. Since then, I have languished behind bars for more than two-thirds of my life, living in a veritable penal tomb.

I am one of 363 people in Michigan sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) for crimes committed as children — sometimes called “juvenile lifers.” I am also the first person in Berrien County, Michigan to be charged under a 1988 law that empowered prosecutors to automatically transfer children to be tried and sentenced in adult court. Michigan ranks first in the nation as the state with the largest number of juvenile lifers.

My arrest occurred during the height of America’s tough-on-crime era when children of color were being demonized as “superpredators” and states were making it easier to impose mandatory LWOP sentences on kids that are tantamount to death-by-incarceration. More than three decades later, I am a husband, proud father to three amazing daughters, and a grandfather. I am also a journalist and social justice advocate who works at the intersection of decarceration, racial justice, and conflict resolution. This month I will turn 49 years old — my 34th birthday in prison.

Like many people convicted of a crime as a child, I have accomplished a lot during my time in prison. But outdated and inhumane sentencing policies still embraced by states like Michigan continue to prevent people like me from getting a second chance to contribute all we have to offer to the world beyond bars. Now, Michigan lawmakers have a chance to change that.

Last year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a historic report that analyzed the practice of sentencing children to life without parole, and called on the United States to “prohibit and abolish the sentence of life imprisonment without parole for juveniles” in Michigan and across the country. The report was issued in response to a petition filed in 2006 by the ACLU, the ACLU of Michigan, and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute on behalf of 32 people sentenced to life without parole in Michigan.

In its scathing analysis of Michigan’s treatment of juvenile lifers, the IACHR found “the sentencing of juveniles to life without parole … incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a human rights treaty ratified by the United States.”

The United States is the only country in the world that still sentences children to life in prison without the possibility of parole. There is a global consensus that children cannot be held to the same standards of responsibility as adults, and that they are entitled to special protection and treatment by the criminal legal system — yet the United States doesn’t do so and remains a shameful outlier.

Recognizing the inhumanity of this treatment, 25 states and the District of Columbia have outlawed life-without-parole sentences for children. In nine other states, no one is serving a juvenile LWOP sentence. But in 16 states, these sentences are still legal.

Michigan, which allows a child over the age of 13 to be sentenced to life without parole, is the worst offender. It’s a stain on our state’s reputation, and the mark of a recalcitrant throw-away mentality. It is also at odds with the growing majority of states in the country that have embraced the concepts of redemption and second chances — and the U.S. Supreme Court, which held in 2012 that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children violate the Eighth Amendment.

Michigan lawmakers now have a chance to bring our state in line with global standards for the treatment of children convicted of serious crimes. Bills were introduced this year in both the state’s House and Senate that would ban life-without-parole sentences for juveniles. These bills (House Bills 5941-5944 and Senate Bills 848-851) all have bipartisan support, reflecting the growing consensus that second chances are imperative, especially for young people. By passing these bills, lawmakers can signal their support for rehabilitation and the eventual reintegration into society of children the state once sentenced to die in prison.

While the IACHR lacks the authority to enforce its recommendation on the U.S., its decision on LWOP sentences for children can and should influence the way Michigan and other states treat children convicted of crimes by highlighting the panoply of human rights violations they’ve been subjected to as a consequence of extreme sentences. The commission’s analysis can also be presented in courts and used to inform lawmakers why LWOP sentences for children are inhumane and misguided.

The IACHR’s report should also prompt the U.S. Senate to finally ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the world’s most widely ratified treaty. The U.S. remains the only country in the world that hasn’t ratified it, the most comprehensive universal human rights treaty on children’s rights. If ratified, the CRC would prohibit life-without-parole sentences for children in all 50 states.

Michigan lawmakers don’t need another independent international commission or court ruling to tell them they are standing on the wrong side of history. It is past time for Michigan and the U.S. to catch up to the global community when it comes to protecting the rights of children and recognizing their inherent dignity. Abandoning the draconian practice of condemning children to die in prison will reflect the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a civilized society.

People post pictures and recordings of themselves every day online. It feels harmless, and for the most part, it is. But new technologies can add a dangerous layer to casual social media posting: the possible extraction, without our knowledge or consent, of our biometric identifiers.

Biometric identifiers are measurements of our personal, unchangeable biological characteristics that uniquely identify us — like fingerprints and faceprints. Biometric identifiers can also be captured from the patterns in our eyes or the sound of our voices. Unlike other forms of personal information, biometric identifiers can’t be changed, even once compromised. People can change their names and addresses to shield their whereabouts and identities from individuals who seek to harm them, but they can’t change their faces. And, since biometric identifiers can be collected surreptitiously and at a distance, they offer a surveillance capability unlike any other technology in the past, making it dangerously easy to identify and track us at protests, AA meetings, counseling sessions, political rallies, religious gatherings, and more.

This danger isn’t far off into the future. The technology exists now: A special scanner can already identify you by your iris from 40 feet away. Fingerprints have been extracted from photos of exposed fingers, taken both up close and from a distance. Because this can happen at a distance, or from recordings posted online, it’s possible without our knowledge or consent. For many of us, hitting the record button to create content online can now pose an unintentional privacy risk that could result in the loss of control over our most sensitive information.

Last month, TikTok users started a seemingly innocuous trend that highlights the irises in their eyes. Users show their eyes up close, then use a high resolution filter to show the details, patterns, and colors of their irises. What started as a new filter in response to the popular TV series “Euphoria” has turned into a rapidly-growing trend: More than 700,000 videos have been created in the span of around a month. However, as these videos proliferated, so did concerns about people inadvertently exposing their unique biometric identifiers to collection through automated scanning of these iris images. Such scanning is a form of biometric technology similar to face recognition and fingerprinting.

Despite TikTok users expressing concern, the company has not answered critical questions, including whether TikTok has partnered with companies selling iris recognition technology, whether they’re harvesting this sensitive data, where it’s being hosted, or what they might use this data for. The lack of transparency is a big part of the problem.

From using facial recognition to automatically recognize and search for people’s faces — even those people who are not on the app — to voice data technology to inform auto-captioning, many of TikTok’s key features rely on their ability to capture mass amounts of data, raising a host of data collection and privacy issues. This includes a recent class action lawsuit in Illinois that accused TikTok of collecting subscribers’ biometrics and other personally identifying data, tracking the data and, in some cases, sharing it with third parties without consent. The lawsuit alleged that the collection of biometric identifiers without consent violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which protects Illinoisians’ right to privacy by establishing guardrails for how companies can collect and use people’s biometric identifiers.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, for its part, denied these accusations, although as part of a settlement they did agree to pay $92 million to individuals whose interests were represented by the class action, as well as to hire a third-party firm for three years to oversee data privacy training for employees, and to avoid collecting biometrics and location data from users without notifying them and without complying with BIPA and similar laws.

After TikTok settled, they quietly updated their privacy policy in summer 2021 to add facial features, audio, and words spoken to a list of information the company can collect automatically. Perhaps most troublingly, the policy specified that the company “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content, including “faceprints and voiceprints.” When TechCrunch reached out to TikTok, they could not confirm what product developments necessitated the addition of biometric data to its list of disclosures about the information it may automatically collect from users, but said it would ask for consent in the case such data collection practices began.

The language used in TikTok’s updated policy is vague, raising questions about how it might be applied or abused. For example, there’s a line in the policy saying: “Where required by law, we will seek any required permissions from you prior to any such collection.” Companies should commit to only collecting and using people’s sensitive biometric identifiers with express prior consent. Unfortunately, intense industry lobbying over the course of years means that very few states have laws requiring consent before companies can collect people’s biometric identifiers. Only Illinois, Texas, and Washington have enacted these kinds of biometric privacy laws. Nor is there a comprehensive federal policy on how companies should go about storing, selling, or sharing this incredibly important personal information. These sparse restrictions are a nightmare for our civil liberties. Companies, like Clearview AI for example, have offered up massive biometric databases to private companies, police, federal agencies, and wealthy individuals, allowing them to secretly track and target whomever they wished using this technology.

If businesses like TikTok have access to our biometric identifiers, there is little regulation defining what they can’t do with them, which is what could make trends like the Euphoria filter so concerning. TikTok is not the only social network operating in a largely unregulated environment where personal data drives corporate profits, and it’s also not the only company sitting on a ton of biometric data. That means that we all need to be vigilant about the growing number of apps and filters that take our most personal data in exchange for creating entertaining content. Companies like TikTok have an obligation to protect their more than 1 billion monthly users’ privacy.

As long as an app claims the right to collect and store biometric data, it is critical that users are given the resources they need to understand what they’re giving away, as well as the ability to protect that information. Particularly, companies should obtain active user consent through a transparent process before collecting biometric identifiers, and include provisions that allow users to deny consent to such data collection without any penalties. And on a bigger scale, more states must join places like Illinois in enacting legislation that ensures that companies only use our biometrics with our knowledge and consent.

The stakes are high, wide-ranging, and unpredictable: When apps have access to our most personal information, there are endless avenues for exploitation.

Higher education should be accessible to everyone — regardless of background or socioeconomic status — but unfortunately, that’s not the reality for all students. For many first generation, low-income, Black, Latinx, and other students of color, the road to college is filled with roadblocks that are deeply rooted in our country’s history of systemic inequity. This path for many of these students begins with poorly funded urban schools, high rates of poverty, inadequate test preparation, unaffordable tuition, and a general lack of guidance available to students applying for financial aid — just to name a few. But the barriers to admission don’t end there.

Many of these students compete for limited spots at universities that use “legacy status” as a factor when weighing admissions — a practice that disproportionately gives preference to white and wealthy student applicants whose family member is an alumni of the college or university they’re applying to. Ending these legacy admissions practices is a critical step that can help address long-standing disparities and inequality in higher education while increasing access for underrepresented students who have been historically shut out.

Legacy admissions policies offer an advantage to applicants, usually coming from elite high schools, who already benefit from greater access to wealth and educational resources. During the admissions process, legacy applicants are given a substantial advantage over non-legacy applicants, on average amounting to a 160 point increase on the SAT — a test which has been shown to cater to white, male students with upper income backgrounds. At top colleges and universities across the country, more legacy students are likely to be accepted than Black and Latinx students combined.

Legacy preferences reinforce long standing economic, social, and educational disparities between white students and BIPOC students by shutting them out of spots in universities and further privileging wealthy, white students with more access to resources and institutional connections. In most cases, admission rates for legacy applicants can outnumber admission rates for Black students, with legacies making up 10 to 25 percent of available student admissions at top universities. Harvard, for example, has an average legacy admissions rate of 33 percent, which is more than five times higher than non-legacy admission rates, while Black students comprise 16 percent of the admitted class of 2025. And as of 2020, Notre Dame led the nation’s top colleges in legacy admissions with a rate of 36 percent, while maintaining one of the smallest Black student bodies at 3 percent.

These inequitable disparities are exactly why the ACLU is advocating to end these practices, which are rooted in racism and tantamount to systemic discrimination, today.

By nature and outcome, legacy preferences are clearly exclusionary. More troubling, they are deeply rooted in our nation’s racist history. Legacy admission policies were enacted among America’s elite higher education institutions as an antisemitic reaction to the increasing enrollment of Jewish immigrant students after World War I. Then President of Harvard Lawrence Lowell instituted legacy preference and a focus on “subjective qualities” into the Harvard application, after failing to institute an explicit quota system. This system allowed Harvard to keep Jewish immigrants out of Harvard under the guise of holistic admissions. Today, legacy admissions act more prominently as an exclusionary barrier for BIPOC, low-income, and first-generation students at colleges and universities.

Let’s be clear: Many of the nation’s top institutions are making progress at breaking down systemic barriers to entry for BIPOC students, as evidenced by growing rates of diversity at the nation’s leading research universities. Yet too many fall short when considering ending legacy preferences, which is perhaps the clearest example of a systemic barrier that restricts BIPOC students from attending college. Among the top 100 universities, only 27 either never used or have ended the use of legacy preferences. However, growing calls to end this decades-old practice have prompted elite universities to start doing away with it. In the last two years, both Johns Hopkins University and Amherst College have announced the elimination of legacy preferences from their admissions procedures, citing commitments to racial equity and the desire to help bolster social mobility. Since making the change, both universities have reported an increase in enrollment of BIPOC and first generation students, as well as Pell grant recipients. The Massachusetts and California Institutes of Technology and a few others have followed suit.

Universities are making progress, but not fast enough.

Fortunately, remedies have begun to appear at the federal and state level. Recently, the Fair College Admissions for Students Act was introduced in the 117th Congress by Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Sen. Jeff Merkley. The bill would deny federal financial aid to colleges and universities that uphold preferential treatment for legacy applicants, thereby opening the door to more equitable and accessible college admissions processes. In 2021, Colorado made history when it became the first state to sign a ban of legacy admissions for public colleges into law. Currently, the Connecticut legislature is considering legislation that would ban legacy preferences at public and private universities.

Political realities in Congress and in many states, however, present difficult paths to ending legacy admissions policies at universities. Further, many university administrations, fearful of losing alumni donations, resist calls to end the practice despite growing opposition among their student bodies. Ending legacy admissions is vital to fostering equity and access in higher education for first generation, low-income, and BIPOC students, enabling them to realize their educational and career dreams — dreams that shouldn’t be reserved for a select few students, based on their income, family connections, or proximity to whiteness.