Matthew Clair, Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221090496 |
| Author | Michael Lawrence Walker |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
many factors have contributed to how LWOP has come to be. The point is worth
underscoring: the death penalty is one among other factors that contribute to the devel-
opment of life without parole. This is not only to say that there is more to LWOP’s
story than capital punishment but also to recognize that what occurs outside the
strict confines of the death penalty field can nevertheless influence the field and there-
fore matters for how researchers interpret what abolitionists do and say. To acknow-
ledge this broader scope is not to take away from the book’s accomplishments, but
it is to note that there are historically significant aspects of LWOP’s development
that an account looking solely at capital punishment will not be able to show.
Underplayed here, for example, is how for much of the twentieth century life
without parole was not a punishment so certain to end with death in prison; its prac-
tices and meanings have changed over time.
As it begins, the book ultimately returns to the words of people serving LWOP,
drawing on 299 letters from incarcerated men and women, as a source for interpreting
how the punishment is experienced. The letters shed light on LWOP’s cruelties, its
pains, and bring to the study a gravity that documentary sources and elite interviews
alone could not. It is one of the book’s unique contributions: to juxtapose the acts and
rhetoric of California lawmakers, abolitionist organizers, and litigants—who by turns
downplay and accentuate LWOP’s severity in a struggle for votes and legal victories
—with the effects on those for whom the punishment is not a matter of strategy or pol-
itics, but of everyday life.
Christopher Seeds
University of California, Irvine
References
Cohen S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Malden, MA:
Polity.
Steiker C and Jordan S (2014) The death penalty and mass incarceration: convergences and
divergences. American Journal of Criminal Law 41(2): 189–207.
Zimring FE and Johnson DT (2012) The dark at the top of the stairs. In: Petersilia J and Reitz
K (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections. New York: Oxford
University Press, pp.737–752.
Matthew Clair, Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in
Criminal Court, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2020; 298 pp.
(including index): ISBN: 978-0-691-19433-2, $19.95 (pbk)
Matthew Clair’s new book, Privilege and Punishment, can be read in more than one way.
Partly a study of trust, of professional-client relationships, of the role of decorum in pro-
fessional settings, of the tension between client-defined justice and justice in practice, of
1156 Punishment & Society 25(4)
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