Book review: Normalizing Extreme Imprisonment: The Case of Life Without Parole in California
| Author | Janani Umamaheswar |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/17488958221083056 |
| Subject Matter | Book review |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2022, Vol. 22(4) 654 –656
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
journals.sagepub.com/home/crj
Book review
Marion Vannier, Normalizing Extreme Imprisonment: The Case of Life Without Parole in California,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021; 212 pp.: 978-0-19-882782-5, £80.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Janani Umamaheswar, George Mason University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/17488958221083056
Drawing on extensive archival research, 58 in-depth interviews with activists, academ-
ics, and lawyers, and 299 letters from incarcerated persons serving life-without-parole
(LWOP) sentences, this book explores how actors involved in the anti-death penalty
movement contributed to the normalization of LWOP in California. In addressing this
topic, the author reveals how struggles to move away from the death penalty erased the
severity of LWOP, resulting in a growing acceptance of LWOP that elides the Challenges
that incarcerated persons enduring this sentence face. Using California as a case study to
demonstrate the routinized used of LWOP as an alternative to the death penalty,
Normalizing Extreme Imprisonment raises critical questions about the overlooked conse-
quences of reformist movements, particularly in punitive social contexts.
The first chapter provides readers with pertinent historical background on the origins
of LWOP in California, noting how debates regarding LWOP reflected the state’s chang-
ing political climate and shifting criminal justice priorities. The next few chapters form
the crux of the book through their exploration of how anti-death penalty criminal justice
actors influenced the normalization of LWOP through their efforts to replace the death
penalty with LWOP instead of removing the death penalty entirely. Chapter 2 specifically
examines the strategies adopted by two key organizations that were involved in the 2012
Savings Accountability and Full Enforcement (SAFE) Campaign in California: Death
Penalty Focus (DPF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California
(ACLU-NC). Members of these two organizations encouraged voters to embrace an abo-
litionism premised on replacing the death penalty with LWOP. Here, the author explores
how these organizations relied on education as well as on arguments based on cost sav-
ings and victims’ rights to garner voter support for LWOP as an alternative to the death
penalty. Chapter 3 turns to the decision making among attorneys who seek LWOP for
their clients solely to circumvent death sentences. This chapter also explores how sen-
tencing practices in California shroud the exceptional severity of LWOP, in part by pre-
venting formal consideration of individual mitigating factors (e.g. in felony murder
1083056CRJ0010.1177/17488958221083056Criminology & Criminal JusticeBook review
research-article2022
To continue reading
Request your trial