Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton, Life Imprisonment: A Global Human Rights Analysis
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520930174 |
| Author | Marion Vannier |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
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Anna Kotova
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton, Life Imprisonment: A Global
Human Rights Analysis, Harvard University Press, 2019; 464 pp., ISBN:
9780674980662.
Life Imprisonment: A Global Human Rights Analysis is an exemplary exercise of
wide-scale comparative scholarly research. In 11 substantive chapters and with
surgical precision, Van Zyl Smit and Appleton describe national trends within
international legal frames to produce a transnational, accessible, and conceptually
engaging socio-legal analysis of life imprisonment in the world.
The book makes two main contributions: it delineates a problematic quantita-
tive phenomenon and evaluates its acceptability against human rights principles.
To achieve this, the authors had to first overcome a definitional hurdle: what does
life imprisonment actually mean? In penal policies, life imprisonment tends to be
systematically described as a contrast to the death penalty rather than on its own
terms. The absence of a typology for life sentences and the diffusion of notions to
describe the punishment in the criminological lexicon (e.g. de facto death sentence,
virtual death sentence, death-in-prison) further attests the great complexity to
grasp the contours of life sentence imprisonment. Van Zyl Smit and Appleton
define life imprisonment as ‘a sentence, following a criminal conviction, which
gives the state the power to detain a person in prison for life, that is, until they
die there.’ (2019: 35)
The last 30 years have seen a remarkable global increase in the number people
serving life sentences, and an important international scholarship has developed to
expose this troubling phenomena (Annison, 2018; Appleton...
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