Impermissible Punishments How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy

By: Judith Resnik

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2025

"This wholly original book provides the untold history of punishment inside prisons. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the invention of the corrections profession that imposed 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. Resnik 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 transatlantic account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights Movement, and pioneering prisoners who insisted law protected their dignity as individuals. Resnik maps the results, including a trial of whipping--Arkansas' preferred "discipline" in the 1960s--and challenges thereafter to hyper-crowded cells, filth, violence, and profound isolation. Resnik tracks 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"--