Worst of the Worst: Rehabilitationist Roots of Life without Parole

Abstract

While life-without-parole (LWOP) sentencing looks like a tough-on-crime repudiation of rehabilitation, it has deep roots in the penal ideology of earlier periods. The notion of incorrigibility on which LWOP rests was already implicit in the rehabilitationist project of the penitentiary movement. With attention to the indeterminate sentencing reforms of the Progressive era, the racialization of criminology, and the rhetoric surrounding LWOP since the 1970s, this article offers a genealogy of a seemingly novel punishment. Ultimately, we need to challenge LWOP not because it is exceptional, but rather because it is typical of both historical and contemporary state practices of banishment.