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Impermissible Punishments

How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy

Impermissible Punishments

How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy

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.

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Law and Legal Studies: Law and Society, Legal History

Political Science: Political and Social Theory

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Reviews

"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 punishments—including the remarkable single trial in the US on the constitutionality of whipping—and 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 work—both in the United States and internationally—that 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"

"Judith Resnik delivers a sweeping and 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 mass incarceration, Resnik reveals how colonial legacies and racial hierarchies are deeply embedded in punitive practices. Through painstaking research and gripping case studies, she highlights the resilience of incarcerated people in challenging systemic oppression and redefining 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"

Table of Contents

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