Life without Parole America's New Death Penalty [Hardcover]

Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as “the new death penalty.” Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.

Life Without Parole raises fundamental concerns both about the justice and the wisdom of this uniquely American phenomenon. It also poses uncomfortable questions for the reform community about the complex intersection between the death penalty and life without parole. If we hope to produce a justice system premised on human rights, we will have to find ways to respond to these challenges. Life Without Parole does a masterful job of pointing us in the right direction to begin that process. A timely and engaging wake-up call, Life Without Parole is the first sustained attempt to understand the meaning of the newest weapon in the American punitive armory. This provocative collection, clear-sighted in its prophetic potential, questions whether LWOP is a humane alternative to the death penalty or a fate worse than death. A must-read for all who want to understand the dark underside of twenty-first century democracy in a country where ever more citizens are condemned to a vast penal complex that redefines death as it expandl³"