Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy
by Judith Resnik
University of Chicago Press, 2025
eISBN: 978-0-226-75491-8 | Cloth: 978-0-226-75474-1
Library of Congress Classification KF9731.R468 2025
Dewey Decimal Classification 365.6440973
eISBN: 978-0-226-75491-8 | Cloth: 978-0-226-75474-1
Library of Congress Classification KF9731.R468 2025
Dewey Decimal Classification 365.6440973
TOC
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
See other books on: Penology | Prison discipline | Prisoners | Prisons | Punishment
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