Can prisons escape their ties to plantations and concentration camps? Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law explores the history of punishment inside prisons and the rules that organize prisons. Resnik charts the invention of the corrections profession that called for decent conditions while imposing radical restrictions on human movement as if doing so was normal. She weaves together the stories of people who debated how to punish and the stories of people living under the regimes that resulted.
Painfully relevant today as some government officials embrace dehumanizing punishments anew, Impermissible Punishments excavates the first-ever international rules aiming to improve the treatment of prisoners, which the League of Nations adopted in 1934 as the Nazis rose to power. Her trans-Atlantic account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the U.S. Civil Rights movement, and of pioneering prisoners who insisted law protected their dignity as individuals. Resnik maps the results, including a trial in the United States about the constitutionality of whipping, which was Arkansas’ preferred “discipline” in the 1960s. This book traces the constitutional challenges thereafter to hyper-crowded cells, filth, violence, and profound isolation, as well as the cross-border expansion of the prison industry, waves of abolition efforts, and the impact of legal precepts rejecting “excessive,” “cruel and unusual,” and “degrading” sanctions. Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments argues that governments committed to equality cannot set out to ruin people and therefore many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.
“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 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 n 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
“In Impermissible Punishments, Judith Resnik shapes and explicates a compelling framework to understand incarceration: the anti-ruination principle. More than a critique of [deleted mass] incarceration, her argument is aslant, reckoning with the legal, historical, and moral—on the way towards a definition of justice that places the burden of it on those who might punish—recognizing that punishment, at its core, must not ruin.”
—Reginald Dwayne Betts, founder & CEO of Freedom Reads and author of Doggerel: Poems