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Death by prison: The emergence of life without parole and perpetual confinement. By Christopher Seeds. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. 288. $29.95 paperback
Christopher Seeds' Death by Prison: The Emergence of Life without Parole and Perpetual Confinement provides the first-ever detailed account of shifting penal practices and societal appetite for imprisoning individuals until death, without reevaluation. The book arrives amid a period of modest but stable decarceration, one in which reform-minded policymakers are reconsidering some of the mass incarceration-era policies that created the 700% increase in the prison population between 1972 and 2009. At the same time, concerns around rising violent crime have triggered some to repeat the rhetoric of mass incarceration, running the risk of a return to its damaging policies.
A driver of mass incarceration has been the expanding number of people serving life sentences with no opportunity for parole (LWOP). More than 55,000 Americans are serving LWOP, reflecting a six-fold increase since 1992 (Maguire et al., 1993; Nellis, 2021). In Florida alone, more than 10,000 people are living death-by-prison sentences (Nellis, 2022). The sharp rise in LWOP sentences is troubling, indeed, but Seeds' book tells us it is only part of a larger concern, one that has been overlooked. Seeds' meticulous research reveals that it is the growing disregard for suffering and death from imprisonment that has been an insidious development intertwined with LWOP expansion. Because current reforms tackle death penalty abolition at one end and reduce punishments for low level, nonviolent convictions at the other, elimination of perpetual confinement is out of reach.
Through the transfiguration of LWOP from...