An original transatlantic history of the invention of the corrections profession and of ensuing debates about punishment’s purposes and prisoners’ rights.
Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.
Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.
Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.
Introduction “If Whipping Were to Be Authorized”
Part I: From the 1800s to World War II: Transatlantic Exchanges about Legitimate Forms of Punishment
1. The “Enlightened” Punishments of the Eighteenth Century
2. Nineteenth-Century Rationales for Deliberately Despotic Degradation
3. The Invention of “Corrections” in the “Civilized World”
4. A Gathering of Experts, a Geo-Political Bureaucracy, a “March of Progress,” and World War I
5. After the War: Envisioning an International “Charter of Prisoners’ Rights”
6. Negotiating Whipping, Dark Cells, and Food Deprivation: The 1934 League of Nations Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners
7. Keeping the “Scientific” Distinct from the “Political”: 1935 Nazi Berlin and Thereafter
8. Who “Speaks for” Corrections, and What to Say? Punishment and Politics in World War II and in Its Wake
9. Fundamental Rights “Even in Prison”: The UN’s 1955 Rules on Prisoners’ Dignity and Punishment’s Parameters
Part II: Challenging the State’s Punitive Violence in the United States, 1965–1970
10. “And the Whipp Destroyed”: Prisoners Laying Claim to Personhood
11. Whipping Permitted, When Neither Excessive nor Arbitrary
12. The Violence Continued Thereafter
13. Whipping’s Trial
14. The Experts Opine: Whipping’s Particular Harms
15. Slowing the Whip through Law and Politics
16. Stopping the Whip but Not the Degradation
17. “Security, Discipline, and Good Order”: Racial Desegregation, Muslims’ Religious Freedom, and Remedies
18. Tolerating Deaths and Acquitting Sadists of Torturing Prisoners
19. A “Totality of Prison Conditions” as Unconstitutional Punishment
20. Corporal Oppression in Prison
Part III: The Political and the Democratic in Punishment: The 1970s to Today
21. “Countenanced by the Constitution” in the 1970s
22. “Constitutional Tolerability” with Prisons as a “Hot Political Potato”
23. A Different “Posture”: Baselines Moving, and Not
24. Courts as Catalysts, Constraints, and Green Lights
25. Spending “Millions of More Dollars” to Do What?
26. “The Minimal Civilized Measure of Life’s Necessities” versus “Rehabilitation”
27. Sequela: Hyper-Density, Spiraling Budgets, and “Warehousing”
28. Double “Bunking,” Solitary Confinement, Mass Incarceration, and Abolition
29. Can It End? Prisons’ Permeability, Punishments’ Shifting Contours, and Corrections’ Transnational Girth and Vulnerabilities
30. Reasoning from Ruin: Inside and Out
Acknowledgments and Note on Sources
Notes
Index
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Weight:454.00