Impermissible Punishments

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.

"Punishing a criminal act by separating the perpetrator from society is a universal concept throughout time and around the globe, but the purpose and end goal of imprisonment have always been a matter of great debate. Is prison meant to be retribution, deterrence, a means of rehabilitation? Resnik explores how imprisonment is addressed in the US Constitution (which bans a nonspecific ‘cruel and unusual punishment’) and analyzes the relevant case history. After an introduction that surveys several centuries of the history of carceral punishment, the book also delves into the lives of individual people who have been imprisoned, both today and in the past. . . . Highly recommended for readers of intellectual or legal histories."

• Introduction “If Whipping Were to Be Authorized”Part I: From the 1800s to World War II: Transatlantic Exchanges about Legitimate Forms of Punishment1. The “Enlightened” Punishments of the Eighteenth Century2. Nineteenth-Century Rationales for Deliberately Despotic Degradation3. The Invention of “Corrections” in the “Civilized World”4. A Gathering of Experts, a Geo-Political Bureaucracy, a “March of Progress,” and World War I5. 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 Prisoners7. Keeping the “Scientific” Distinct from the “Political”: 1935 Nazi Berlin and Thereafter8. Who “Speaks for” Corrections, and What to Say? Punishment and Politics in World War II and in Its Wake9. Fundamental Rights “Even in Prison”: The UN’s 1955 Rules on Prisoners’ Dignity and Punishment’s ParametersPart II: Challenging the State’s Punitive Violence in the United States, 1965–197010. “And the Whipp Destroyed”: Prisoners Laying Claim to Personhood11. Whipping Permitted, When Neither Excessive nor Arbitrary12. The Violence Continued Thereafter13. Whipping’s Trial14. The Experts Opine: Whipping’s Particular Harms15. Slowing the Whip through Law and Politics16. Stopping the Whip but Not the Degradation17. “Security, Discipline, and Good Order”: Racial Desegregation, Muslims’ Religious Freedom, and Remedies18. Tolerating Deaths and Acquitting Sadists of Torturing Prisoners19. A “Totality of Prison Conditions” as Unconstitutional Punishment20. Corporal Oppression in PrisonPart III: The Political and the Democratic in Punishment: The 1970s to Today21. “Countenanced by the Constitution” in the 1970s22. “Constitutional Tolerability” with Prisons as a “Hot Political Potato”23. A Different “Posture”: Baselines Moving, and Not24. Courts as Catalysts, Constraints, and Green Lights25. 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 Abolition29. Can It End? Prisons’ Permeability, Punishments’ Shifting Contours, and Corrections’ Transnational Girth and Vulnerabilities30. Reasoning from Ruin: Inside and OutAcknowledgments and Note on SourcesNotesIndex