Life without Parole

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.

Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. (Editor) Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. He is the author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (WW Norton and Company, 2004) and Co-Author of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. Austin Sarat (Editor) Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written or edited dozens of books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution, Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law, and Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities and Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era, which won the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Book Award.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Lives on the Line: From Capital Punishment to Life without Parole Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat Part I: Life without Parole in Context 1 Mandatory Life and the Death of Equitable Discretion Josh Bowers 2 Death-in-Prison Sentences: Overutilized and Underscrutinized Jessica S. Henry 3 Creating the Permanent Prisoner Sharon Dolovich 4 Life without Parole under Modern Theories of Punishment Paul H. Robinson Part I I : Prospects for Reform 5 Defending Life I. Bennett Capers 6 Life without Parole and the Hope for Real Sentencing Reform Rachel E. Barkow 7 No Way Out? Life Sentences and the Politics of Penal Reform Marie Gottschalk 8 Dignity and Risk: The Long Road from Graham v. Florida to Abolition of Life without Parole Jonathan Simon About the Contributors Index