Abstract
Death by Prison is a very well-written and didactically structured book that delves into the emergence of life imprisonment without parole in the United States. The topologies are numerous and the data are rich and diverse, allowing Seeds to consider both nationwide patterns and achieve focused local-level analyses (e.g. Florida).
The book challenges a number of conventional narratives, about the death penalty, life imprisonment and its origins, and upsets a number of categorisations – in particular, those around the extreme end of the spectrum. If anything, this is a Derridan-like book that surgically deconstructs LWOP's multifaceted Rubik's cube and rebuilds it entirely. The main argument can be summarized as follows: despite its embrace, routine use and absent legal and political scrutiny, life without parole is not a new punishment. It has long existed and is the result of deep institutional metamorphoses.
A brief summary of the chapters does no justice to the sophisticated unfolding of the argument but may help get an aperçu of the book's ramifications. There are three parts and nine chapters. The first part traces LWOP's historical roots. The first chapter explores how perpetual confinement was conceptualized and used historically in the late nineteenth century; the second chapter moves to the early twentieth century to lay out an early history of LWOP. In the third chapter, Seeds contrasts the contemporary model of LWOP with its earlier version to uncover distinct meanings and practices whilst evidencing a form of continuum; LWOP is a ‘product of process’ (19). In the next three chapters (4, 5, 6), Seeds examines what he calls ‘three major upheavals in the legal and penal fields which are all responsible for the emergence of LWOP’. These upheavals include the US Supreme Court's case Furman v Georgia (1972) which found the death penalty to be unconstitutional; and the progressive dismantling of release practices of parole and clemency. In the last part of the book, the author returns to the national level to consider how LWOP ‘solidified’ as a sentence to death by prison. Seeds examines case law and litigation practices, then scrutinises the national anti-death penalty movement before focusing on the part played by the prison as an institution.
Drawing on Foucault's (1981) famed critique of the endless (and somewhat redundant) debate of the death penalty and its alternative (when the focus, Foucault claims, should be on identifying societies which embrace definitive penal exclusion by death or by imprisonment), Seeds concludes that what matters for penal reform is to privilege ‘a system that remains reflective, alert to how it carries out punishment and vigilant about when and how it needs to change’. A most urgent and world-level reflection, which the book hints at on different occasions, concerns the intertwined phenomena of aging, old age and life expectancy. The ‘greying’ of the prison population has seen an upward trend in the rest of the world and older prisoners are the most exposed to lack of healthcare and at risk of death in detention (PRI, 2022). The literature on older adults in prisons (see, e.g., Aday and Krabill, 2012; Crawley and Sparks, 2005; Handtke et al., 2017; Leigey, 2015) distinguishes between three groups of older prisoners: (1) growing old in prison because of a life or other indeterminate sentence; (2) being imprisoned for the first time at old age for very long sentences, which is the case of war crimes criminal (e.g. Papon, Sawoniuk) but also through a new emphasis on sex offences, child abuse, etc.; (3) having gone in and out of prisons over the entire life span. However, the different genealogies of punishing old age have been under-researched and warrant careful investigation whilst inviting comparative enterprises (Brangan, 2021). In this sense, Death by Prison is inspiring for considering a range of new questions on the penal narratives and practices relevant to ‘old age’, how they intersect with issues of perpetual confinement, and how they have evolved historically and in recent times.
