The Cost of a Life: A High Price for a First Offense

In July 2025, Crosswinds News began working with women incarcerated at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center and Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center in Oklahoma, listening to pitches for editorial (opinion) stories, providing feedback, and offering editing support. This is one of those stories.

Written By: Crystal Avilla

I spent the last few weeks of my father’s life speaking to him through a cracked receiver that seemed to weigh 5 pounds. The connection was horrible, and he was hard to understand due to the raucous background noise on my end, but I strained to hear him, tuning out cries of “microwave!” and the officer barking out names for mail call. The conversation always started out slow, and invariably every time the morphine fog lifted enough for my dad to remember who I was, a computerized voice interrupted to say I had “one minute left.” It was frustrating. All I could do was try to talk without falling to pieces. I was helpless to ease my father’s pain, unable to hold his hand or even smile at him.

I have been serving a life without parole prison sentence for twenty-six years, and so far, it has cost the state of Oklahoma more than $591,500 to house me. But I have paid a much higher price.

Before incarceration I never considered what ‘life’ actually meant. That was probably because I was barely twenty-one when I was arrested, and the only thing I did know was that someday I would probably get married, have children and figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life - although not necessarily in that order. The future? That was a foggy landscape so far off and surreal that it was unimportant.

Now, my only connection with the outside world is through photographs. That was how I attended my little sister’s wedding. Not as her maid of honor, but as a spectator. An afterthought. Seeing how happy she was surrounded by her new family - without me - was a blow I will never recover from. Over time, I also witnessed the first few moments of my nephew and niece’s lives through snapshots. First Halloween costumes. The mud fight in their grandpa’s front yard. Crystal’s first real boyfriend, Daniel’s first job. We talk on the phone, but it is not a replacement for human contact. Too late, I came to realize what I did not know at twenty-one.

What is the true cost of a life sentence?

There are some who think I got what I deserve. That even though it was a first offense I committed a crime and a life sentence is justified, even lenient. I do not think these people understand what sentencing a person to life, life without parole (LWOP) or over fifty years in prison actually costs.

Think about what a person might experience in just twenty years. They might go to countless birthday parties, get married, get divorced, save up money for college, write a book, survive a cancer scare, go on vacation, run a marathon, schedule a mammogram, purchase their first car, go grocery shopping, nurse someone they care about back to health, paint their kitchen, learn a new language, walk their child down the aisle or curse the heavens when their favorite team loses the super bowl. Now magnify these experiences over a lifetime. These mundane moments, some good, some bad, add up. They become a part of a person’s individual identity. If we take these away and replace an entire lifetime with an endless repetition of orange jumpsuits, brick walls, metal beds and concrete, is that life really worth living?

For years, solutions such as improving the parole process, second look sentencing and placing caps on sentences for first-time offenders have been discussed, but career politicians use fear tactics and tough on crime rhetoric to quash them before they have a chance to gain momentum. Supporters of smart reform cite numerous studies with a preponderance of evidence that people age out of crime and that harsher sentences do nothing to keep the public safe from people who would not reoffend. Those in their mid-to late teens and early 20s are much likelier to commit a crime than they are in their 30s and 40s. 

Numerous studies have shown the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25. Until then, a person can be thought of as having a juvenile mentality. Cultures all around the world - including ours - acknowledge the existence of the age-crime curve, a sharp increase of offending behavior beginning during early adolescence, and then a steep decline during early adulthood followed by a steadier decline thereafter. The age-crime curve model is so widely accepted it has been called “the most important regularity in criminology” and even a “law of nature.” By the age of 28, about 85% of delinquent behavior ceases, and by middle age even the most dedicated career criminals taper off significantly. 

In January of 2025, a census of life imprisonment in Oklahoma was published. It reported 1,990 people in Oklahoma were serving life sentences, 958 were serving LWOP, and 637 were serving sentences of fifty years or more, for an overall total of 3,585. That is approximately 1 in 8 Oklahoma inmates serving a life sentence.

With an estimated per person cost to house these men and women of around $22,750 annually, in one year alone this population costs the state $81,558,750. That is over eighty-one million dollars! This means a significant percentage of ODOC’s annual operating budget of around $544 million is earmarked specifically for this steadily growing population of Oklahoma citizens. If the harshest sentences were reserved only for those with a pattern of violent behavior rendering them irredeemable, this expense would be understandable. But the truth is that the majority of those serving long sentences - especially women - were convicted of a first offense. Taking into account the number of people serving LWOP nearly doubled between 2003 and 2016, growing by 93%, this trend is especially disturbing.

By the time I am seventy years old, the State of Oklahoma will have spent $1,137,500 - over one million dollars - to keep me behind bars. And that is if I remain perfectly healthy for my entire incarceration, which I will not. Once a person is over the age of 45, the cost to house them goes up dramatically because of unanticipated secondary health costs associated with an aging population who has no access to preventative medicines or proper nutrition. I turned 47 last week and just visited the hospital to receive physical therapy for a knee injury sustained in the past year. In the last 6 months, I was prescribed blood pressure pills and was diagnosed with degenerative arthritis. I have watched the streams of gray in my hair turn to rivers, dreading what it means.

I hope to one day receive a second chance at freedom. In the meantime, I have given everything to these concrete walls that surround me. My youth, my freedom. Any chance I had of being a mother or making a decision that is truly mine. 

The part of me they will never take is how close I felt to my father during his final moments over that generic black prison phone. 

Even though our conversation was haunted by the specter of his impending death, it was the first time in my life I remember him saying he was proud of me. He said it over and over, like he was trying to make up for all the years of resentment and stubborn silence. I still think about those conversations. The knowledge that I will never talk with him outside these prison walls again is a reminder of the true cost of a life - not measured in years served, but in moments you never get back. 

Crystal Avilla is the author of many poems, short stories, and journalistic works that have appeared in a variety of publications. She has spent the last twenty-six years in Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud, Oklahoma, writing and honing her craft. Her second novel, Ground Zero, is currently available on Amazon and she is hard at work on the next. Crystal Avilla is a founding editor for the national award-winning Mabel Bassett Balance, the facility’s first-ever newspaper. She is a proud co-facilitator for Writers Guild Advanced & Beginners, where she helps aspiring novelists and is the winner of the Axley Creative Writing Award from Rose State College.