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Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $45.00
ISBN13: 9780226754741
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Oct 10 2025
Pages: 792
Weight: 2.69
Height: 2.03 Width: 6.38 Depth: 9.16
Language: English
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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