For a nation founded in freedom, it is remarkable that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Nearly two million Americans are in prison—that’s nearly 1 percent of our adult population, and the rate continues to rise. The consequences of our carceral state are many, with minority communities in particular experiencing devastating impacts.
With her forthcoming history Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy (University of Chicago Press; August 29, 2025), Yale Law scholar Judith Resnik offers a nuanced and impeccable examination of how we have chosen to punish those we imprison—and how we have justified it. Tracing three hundred years of transatlantic debates and developments, Resnik explores how our current penal system evolved. Aggressive imprisonment, whippings, and other harsh punishments, she shows, were far from inevitable. Resnik builds from this context to argue that this system stands at odds with our democratic values, and then she sets a course for its transformation.
Extreme crowding, isolation from family and community, solitary confinement, poor healthcare, restricted movement, surveillance. Serving a year in a US prison reduces life expectancy by two years. What do we permit as punishment when it comes to people convicted of crimes, and how do we decide what’s acceptable? Understanding our carceral system requires learning about the invention of corrections as a profession and the rise of prisoners’ rights as a movement. Resnik begins with Enlightenment-era debates, shows how modern incarceration’s practices are entangled with the violence of plantations and concentration camps, and explores the impacts of the burgeoning United Nations and the civil rights movement, when prisoners insisted that they were people whose “dignity” and “rights” law had to protect.
Along the way, Resnik builds a persuasive and brilliantly supported argument for using the idea of “anti-ruination” in prisons. For centuries, governments have been banned from levying excessive fines meant to bring people to financial ruin. Why, then, are other forms of punishment still used to effectively ruin people? By exploring anti-ruination in light of the history of punishment and its current practices, Resnik opens the door to ending cruel modern practices that are taken for granted.
Resnik is a longtime professor at Yale Law and the founding director of Yale’s Liman Center for Public Interest Law. She is a highly respected scholar and a sought-out expert on the relationship between our democratic practices and government services, particularly courts and prisons (see recently The New York Times).