Maybe Gov. Tom Corbett is not a cold-hearted conservative consumed with a commitment to cut state government spending principally by gutting services essential to sustaining minimal sustenance for Pennsylvania’s most desperately needy citizens.

However, after reading the comprehensive analysis of devastating impacts from the governor’s budget-slashing practices published in last week’s Philadelphia City Paper, it is hard not to conclude Corbett budget initiatives aren’t deliberate scorched-earth assaults.

That City Paper analysis detailed Corbett budget cuts ravaging so many, from seniors needing medical services to school districts now unable to fund educating children.

Instead of criticism though, give Corbett a benefit of the doubt — extending ex-prosecutor Corbett a courtesy he rarely extended non-politically-connected persons facing trial and prisoners appealing convictions corrupted by official misconduct.

Accept Corbett wanting firmer financial footing for Pennsylvania in these slippery times of escalating costs and decreasing revenues arising from America’s on-going recession.

Corbett must generate money somewhere since he vehemently opposes raising revenues from available sources like fully taxing Marcellus Shale gas extraction (which is detrimentally “taxing” the state’s environment) or taxing marijuana after decriminalization — a fee millions of Pennsylvania pot smokers would willingly pay including users working inside the Capitol in Harrisburg.

In an effort to assist Corbett identify revenue draining areas, there is one area in the state’s budget, ripe for reform, currently costing in excess of $15.5 million annually containing a built-in guarantee that the current cost will increase dramatically during this entire century.

That $15.5 million-plus ripe for eliminating is the amount Pennsylvania spends for its legal penchant of slamming life-without-parole sentences on juveniles convicted in adult courts of felony homicide crimes including convictions of young persons not directly involved in the homicide that sent them to state prison.

Pennsylvania presently holds approximately 470 persons languishing under life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed while juveniles, according to those expert in this sentencing slime pit.

State prisons, in 2010, held a dozen persons serving life-without-parole sentences who were under the age twenty and another 181 aged 20–24 according to the state prison system’s own statistics.

In Pennsylvania’s prison system the oldest juvenile-sentenced-lifer is 70, having spent 56-years in prison for a homicide committed at age 14.

That 70-year-old received that life sentence for a crime committed before that person could legally drive, drink, vote, marry, enlist in the military or even think rationally according to scientific evidence recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court that utilized that evidence in recent years to abolish death sentences for juveniles and juvenile life sentences for non-homicide crimes.

That $15.5 million, spent on persons serving juvenile life sentences in Pennsylvania, increases annually as young inmates’ age, a cost arising from soaring costs for medical, security and other services required for elderly inmates.

At one state prison, just long-term care for infirmed elderly inmates costs $63,500 annually per inmate, over $30,000 more than the annual cost for younger inmates.

Pennsylvania carries the ugly distinction of being the state with the largest population of persons serving juvenile-life-without-parole sentences in the United States.

And so-called freedom championing America carries the even uglier distinction of standing “alone in the world in the imposition of juvenile life sentences with no option for parole” according to a D.C.-based Sentencing Project report.

Given the race-based disparities infesting America’s criminal justice system, it’s not surprising that over 65 percent of Pa. prison inmates serving juvenile-life-without-parole sentences are African American.

Gov. Corbett, his conservative confederates including legislators and prosecutors plus victim’s rights advocates certainly contend that any juvenile committing a felony homicide condemns themselves to the (rightfully horrific) sentence of life without parole.

Yet, statistics do not support that strident stance.

In Pennsylvania approximately 26 percent of juvenile lifers did not themselves commit a homicide — receiving convictions under legal measures mandating mandatory sentencing for anyone involved in a felony murder irrespective of level of participation in that crime.

Further, almost 60 percent of Pa.’s juvenile lifers were first-time offenders — not the habitual violent offenders normally considered legitimate candidates for medieval-like until-they-die imprisonment.

Persons seeking reforms in the money draining, morally outrageous juvenile life sentencing do not seek immediate releases but merely the opportunity for those serving such sentences to receive parole review and possible release if deemed worthy.

Recidivism for the 285 Pa. lifers released under commuted sentences is 1 percent, according to Sentencing Project statistics.

“We seek the possibility of parole, not the guarantee of release. We’re not advocating the release of dangerous sociopaths,” said Anita Colon, Pennsylvania Coordinator of the National Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth.

The state of juvenile lifers is not merely an academic interest for Colon.

Colon’s brother, Robert Holbrook, received a juvenile life sentence for serving as a look-out on his 16th birthday for a drug-related, 1990 Philadelphia robbery that ended in a homicide. Holbrook didn’t commit that murder.

Holbrook, who’s served over 20-years in prison, wrote in a 2008 essay that “a child offender” who makes a terrible decision as a youth in Pennsylvania receives less “justice and leniency” than in countries like China and Libya.

If Corbett is serious about cutting wasteful state spending he would join the movement to reform laws mandating mandatory life-without-parole sentences for certain juvenile offenders — sentences that some adult mass murders don’t receive.

“When the law preys on its child offenders … it is no better than the criminal predators that prey on children in society,” Holbrook wrote.

Linn Washington Jr. is a graduate of the Yale Law Fellowship Program.