Abstract
Death by Prison offers a historical reconstruction of the emergence and development of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) in the United States. It aims to explain how LWOP, particularly, and perpetual confinement in broader terms, became routine practices in U.S. penality during the last decades of the 20th century. While in the mid-1980s, almost 3000 people served an LWOP sentence in U.S. state and federal prisons, by 2020, the number of individuals serving this type of sentence had virtually reached 56,000 (p. 5).
According to Seeds, scholarship often describes the rise of this phenomenon from two complementary perspectives. One classical account links the expansion of LWOP from the 1970s onwards with the search for alternatives to replace the death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it in Furman v. Georgia (1972) to reinstate it in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) then (see e.g., Harvard Law Review Association, 2006). The other explanation posits that policies associated with the dismantling of the rehabilitative ideal and the rise of mass incarceration, like determinate sentencing schemes and mandatory minimums, shaped the enlargement of LWOP (see e.g., Tonry, 2016). In conjunction, these developments would explain the consolidation of LWOP as a feature of the contemporary U.S. penal field.
Death by Prison seeks to challenge this narrative. Certainly, Seeds recognizes that the transformations in death penalty laws and practices, as well as the tough-on-crime and sentencing policies of mass incarceration, are indispensable elements to understanding the growth of LWOP. However, he demonstrates that these considerations are insufficient to account for this penal form’s emergence and spread. Based on a detailed historical analysis, Seeds characterizes life imprisonment as a practice that has shifted its position and meaning within the U.S. penal field through multiple processes of institutional transformation. In all these processes, the ways of thinking about life imprisonment changed, creating the conditions for the solidification of what today is known as LWOP and the socio-cultural acceptance of perpetual confinement as a legitimate punishment method. In what follows, I summarize the arguments underpinning Death by Prison's core ideas. Subsequently, I delve into some of the contributions of Seeds’ study to the contemporary sociology of punishment.
Death by Prison has nine chapters divided into three parts. The first part, “Foundations,” reconstructs the origins of perpetual punishments in the U.S. The first chapter addresses the historical concepts and practices associated with life imprisonment, noting how incarceration until death occupied a secondary role in the early penal philosophy of the nation but, at the same time, it operated as a base to structure both punitive and rehabilitative programs. The second chapter explores the history of life without parole sentences during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. It portrays how the precursor of LWOP, a “natural life” or “perpetual imprisonment” punishment, admitted the possibility of release by executive clemency and parole practices. The third chapter describes how, since the 1970s, LWOP crystallized in state laws until becoming a standard penal form.
The second part, “Eruptions,” explains how three “major upheavals in the legal and penal fields” (p. 20) of the U.S. catalyzed the adoption of LWOP in numerous states. The fourth chapter explains why the short abolition of the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia did not give way to an immediate expansion of LWOP legislation. It shows that multiple state governments only enacted LWOP statuses in the 1980s and 1990s and claims that the main effect of Furman was the production of structural, discursive, and ideological movements, which facilitated the reconsideration of the role and function of life sentences in modern U.S. penality. The fifth chapter suggests that the development of LWOP resulted from state experiments with life sentences throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The fall of the rehabilitative ideal and indeterminate sentencing led to the application of fixed sentencing schemes and the imposition of constraints in parole mechanisms. In this scenario, life sentences’ structural meanings and consequences within the criminal legal system were blurry and uncertain. These characteristics enabled the emergence of LWOP as a residual product of transformations in sentencing and parole and allowed its consolidation without major obstacles. The sixth chapter focuses on the case of Pennsylvania to illustrate how limitations in granting executive clemency were also cardinal for LWOP institutionalization.
The third and final part, “Adaptation and Solidification,” by scrutinizing LWOP treatment in different institutional sites, depicts the configuration of LWOP as a punishment entailing the actual confinement of individuals for their lifespan. The seventh chapter concentrates on the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in articulating the meaning of LWOP as a sentence of perpetual confinement. The eighth chapter documents how, particularly in the early 1990s, the U.S. anti-death penalty movement began to embrace LWOP as an alternative to capital punishment and, in doing so, accelerated the expansion of the former as a distinctive aspect of the nation's penality. Lastly, the ninth chapter analyzes the contributions of prison-building projects of the 1980s and 1990s to solidifying LWOP. It underscores how these programs weakened the concerns of safety and space that corrections departments typically used to oppose life imprisonment.
Overall, Death by Prison successfully achieves its goal. It provides a compelling and balanced narrative to rethink the relevance of LWOP in contemporary U.S. penal history. With its multi-layered perspective on the trajectory of the ideas, institutions, and actors involved in consolidating LWOP, the book advances well-elaborated and profound arguments that complexify the socio-legal analysis of life imprisonment. Moreover, Death by Prison provides at least three valuable insights into punishment and society scholarship. I will briefly explain each of them in the next paragraphs.
First, the book illuminates how studying specific penal forms can help construct a history of the present around penality (Garland, 2014). Death by Prison is, at the same time, an account of LWOP's institutional development and an analysis of the U.S. penal field. Instead of limiting his study to a narrow set of transformations associated with perpetual confinement, Seeds utilizes LWOP as a lens through which the reader may understand both the characteristics of this punishment and of the U.S. penal system. In this sense, Death by Prison builds a history of the present. However, in partial contrast to other macro-level similar exercises (e.g., Garland, 2001), Seeds’ analysis presents two distinctive characteristics. On the one hand, it is based on detailed explorations of state-level trends and practices. On the other hand, it uses the peculiarities of a marginal penal form to examine broader patterns of action and ways of thinking that have been crucial in structuring the U.S. criminal justice system. By dissecting a specific penal form, the book presents an attractive analytical model to understand the schemes undergirding the deployment of the power to punish.
Second, Death by Prison sheds light on the “relational interdependency of penal forms.” With this expression, I refer to how transformations of certain penal techniques can generate changes in other penal forms. As Seeds illustrates, the current routine character of LWOP in the U.S. is related to shifts observed in the arrangements of the death penalty apparatus and sentencing policies. The movements within these realms resonated in the architecture of the penal field and the structures surrounding life imprisonment, shaping the conditions for the latter’s turn into LWOP. This way, Death by Prison reminds us that penality is a complex of interdependent elements (Garland and Young, 1983) connected through links that vary in scope and deepness. Studying the factors determining the density and extension of the relations between different penal forms could constitute a productive avenue to research the recent evolution of the penal field in the U.S. and other regions through a novel prism.
Finally, the concept of disregard that Seeds employs in the book (see pp. 21–24; 175–178) could complement one of the latest proposals on the potential of historical-institutional frameworks to analyze penal changes. Seeds poses that LWOP gained relevance in the U.S. due to penal actors’ disregard around its role in and impacts on the nation's historical penality. Seeds also underscores that disregard entails an implicit acceptance of the ways of doing and thinking about things and constitutes an inherent element of the processes driving mass incarceration. Based on this argument, one may characterize Death by Prison as a study analyzing what was not directly done or said regarding LWOP to understand its changes.
Recently, Rubin (2023) scrutinized the promises of path dependence theories to study penality and its changes. One element of path dependence that Rubin especially considered was the notion of stasis, understood as a period of apparent stability in penal landscapes. She explained that periods of penal stability could contain elements of transformation not captured by most theories of penal evolution, with their predominant focus on moments of disruption. Considering this idea, one could take advantage of Seeds’ notion of disregard to examine periods of “penal stasis.” In Death by Prison, Seeds used the concept of disregard to trace the underground changes and effects of LWOP, a penal form that subtly moved from the margins to the center of the U.S. penal field. To develop his analysis, Seeds explored a series of processes in which what was not manifestly done, thought, and said about life imprisonment marked its historical trajectory. Centering his view on disregard, Seeds uncovered significant foundations of penal changes linked to the emergence of LWOP. Perhaps, by using the concept of disregard to study penal phases or techniques that seem stable over time, scholars might find new historical and institutional elements that will enhance our understanding of the processes and conditions involved in constructing modern penality.
In sum, Death by Prison constitutes an important contribution to socio-legal studies of life imprisonment and punishment and society literature. Those interested in these fields will find this book an excellent source of knowledge and reflection.
