Normalizing Extreme Imprisonment

The concluding Chapter 5 offers a new explanation for how reforms and those driving them can end up normalizing, in the sense of making the public view as acceptable, incredibly severe punitive practices. While not responsible for activating mechanisms of normalization, some death penalty abolitionists have nonetheless helped to maintain and reinforce them. In the shadow of the traditional death penalty, an inhumane form of punishment has proliferated and been championed by a range of penal progressive reformers. This chapter then brings the story to the present. It shows how LWOP is developing in other states and the rest of the world and discusses the dangers of using life imprisonment to challenge LWOP.

The Origins of LWOP in California

Chapter 1 turns to the Californian Congress where opponents of the death penalty first lobbied for LWOP before legislators. It critically examines the period during which the idea of sentencing offenders to life imprisonment with no possibility of release first emerged, starting in the early 1900s and culminating with the introduction of LWOP for capital murder in 1978 in the Californian Penal Code. What emerges from this archival research is that different experts—prison wardens, police officials, academics, spiritual leaders, and criminologists—offered LWOP as a strategic way for legislators to argue against the death penalty. This novel approach was however diverted from its progressive endeavours to serve more punitive agendas. Legislators concerned with preserving capital punishment in contexts of sensationalized crimes and early forms of populist demands drove the reforms that introduced LWOP. This historical investigation reveals that the punishment’s particular severity can serve agendas which are seemingly in tension with one another.

Campaigning for LWOP

Chapter 2 explores the broader political sphere and focuses on the strategies developed by two of the most vocal organizations involved in the Savings Accountability and Full Enforcement (SAFE) Campaign of 2012 in California (hereinafter SAFE Campaign): The ‘American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’ (ACLU-NC) and ‘Death Penalty Focus’ (DPF). This chapter of the book combines an analysis of pamphlets, flyers, and public discourses, with a narrative informed by interviews with some of the Campaign’s most vocal activists. The politics of abolition in the public sphere are characterized by a progressive instrumentalization of LWOP’s severity that is shaped by penal populist paradigm shifts and heightened fiscal concerns.

Prisoners’ Experiences of LWOP

Chapter 4 sheds light on the punishment’s extreme severity. It is commonly assumed that LWOP differs from traditional death sentences because it preserves prisoners’ lives. Drawing on the 299 letters written by men and women serving LWOP in California, this chapter reveals other meanings of death, complicating conventional categorizations of punishments. Prisoners’ testimonies point to the certainty of dying behind bars as well as to the concomitant impossibility to quantify the time left to serve. Death also takes on a more embodied dimension, provoked by ageing and diseased bodies, as well as through the removal of parenthood and parenting. Death under LWOP is characterized by an indifference for prisoners’ human capacity to change.

Settling and Pleading for LWOP

In courtrooms, defence attorneys, too, rely on LWOP to avoid a death sentence for their client. In examining sentencing pathways, Chapter 3 finds that very little space is given to prosecutors, lawyers, and judges and jurors to discuss or debate, evaluate, and review the severity of LWOP. In part, this has to do with how the sentencing mechanisms—such as plea bargaining, mandatory application, and proportionality review—detach the offender, in particular his or her level of culpability, from the punishment. This chapter triangulates textual analysis of criminal and sentencing laws in California and interviews with prosecutors and defence lawyers. It also relies on a small statistical component of data on LWOP and death sentences collected from two district attorney’s offices (Alameda and Los Angeles).

Introduction

The introductory chapter lays out the puzzle surrounding life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). LWOP holds a unique place in the landscape of extreme forms of punishment. It stands at the intersection between the death penalty and long-term imprisonment. While recognized as being particularly cruel since at least Beccaria, relatively few empirical studies have focused on LWOP’S extreme severity. Despite growing awareness and evidence of LWOP’S cruelty, the punishment has become a rather ordinary practice in the American sentencing toolkit. The expansion and proliferation of LWOP in America stands in sharp contrast with the rest of the world where the punishment is deemed reprehensible. LWOP’S growth in the United States is particularly remarkable for the apparent dispassion with which the American public and various penal state actors have embraced and accepted such a practice. Other than prisoners-led organizations, like The Other Death Penalty Project, there are very few strong and vocal activist groups campaigning against the punishment. By contrast, strong and vocal groups have campaigned against prison overcrowding and death sentences. While sharing features with both imprisonment and the death penalty, LWOP’S extreme severity has not triggered similar attention and reaction. Instead, the punishment has even been actively promoted by a number of criminal justice actors including those who traditionally challenge degrading and inhumane treatments. This book investigates how, using the development of LWOP in the Californian death penalty context as an example, extreme forms of imprisonment can become normalized.