An original transatlantic history of the invention of the corrections profession and of ensuing debates about punishments 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.
Recenzijas
What forms of degradation does our democracy still allow in punishing people? In this masterful and sweeping book that ranges over centuries, Judith Resnik charts the enduring efforts of prisoners to stop ruinous punishmentsincluding the remarkable single trial in the US on the constitutionality of whippingand the forces they've run up against. Her deeply human perspective and rigorous historic analysis make this an indispensable work. -- Emily Bazelon | author of "Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration" In this truly original and deeply researched long history of punishment, Judith Resnik offers an overdue look at the dizzying kaleidoscope of ethical, legal, political, and human forces at workboth in the United States and internationallythat have created our massive and most brutal system of justice. As important, she gives us the tools to reimagine it. Given the critical significance of context, both past and present, Impermissible Punishments is a stunning must-read. -- Heather Ann Thompson | Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy" In Impermissible Punishments, Judith Resnik shapes and explicates a compelling framework to understand incarceration: the anti-ruination principle. More than a critique of incarceration, her argument is aslant, reckoning with the legal, historical, and moralon the way towards a definition of justice that places the burden of it on those who might punishrecognizing that punishment, at its core, must not ruin. -- Reginald Dwayne Betts | founder & CEO of Freedom Reads and author of "Doggerel: Poems" Judith Resnik delivers an incisive examination of incarceration as a defining, yet deeply flawed, institution of modern democracy. Tracing the evolution of punishment from Enlightenment-era reforms to modern incarceration on its massive scale, Resnik reveals how colonial legacies and racial hierarchies are deeply embedded in punitive practices. Through meticulous research and gripping case studies, she highlights the resilience of incarcerated people who challenged systemic oppression and redefined their rights from within prison walls. Provocative and illuminating, Impermissible Punishments is an essential text for understanding the stakes of contemporary carceral reform and the pursuit of justice. -- Elizabeth Hinton | author of "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America"
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 UNs 1955 Rules on Prisoners
Dignity and Punishments Parameters
Part II: Challenging the States Punitive Violence in the United States,
19651970
10. And the Whipp Destroyed: Prisoners Laying Claim to Personhood
11. Whipping Permitted, When Neither Excessive nor Arbitrary
12. The Violence Continued Thereafter
13. Whippings Trial
14. The Experts Opine: Whippings 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 Lifes 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
Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She has authored many works, including Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms.
