Book Review: Death by Prison: The Emergence of Life Without Parole and Perpetual Confinement
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231168987 |
| Author | DIEGO ROCHOW |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
CHRISTOPHER SEEDS, Death by Prison: The Emergence of Life Without Parole and Perpetual
Confinement. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022, pp. 288, ISBN 9780520379978,
£71 (hbk), £25 (pbk).
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 20
th
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 manda-
tory minimums, shaped the enlargement of LWOP (see e.g., Tonry, 2016). In conjunc-
tion, 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 sen-
tencing 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 condi-
tions 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. Subsequen tly, I delve into some of
the contributions of Seeds’study to the contemporary sociology of punishment.
Death by Prison hasnine chapters divided into three parts. Thefirst part, “Founda tions,”
reconstructsthe origins of perpetual punishmentsin the U.S. The first chapter addresses the
historical concepts and practices associated with life imprisonment, noting how incarcer-
ation 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 pro-
grams. The second chapter explores the history of life without parole sentences during the
first two-thirds of t he 20
th
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.
492 Social & Legal Studies 32(3)
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