Death Penalty “Abolition” in Neoliberal Times:

Dilts, Andrew

doi:10.2307/j.ctt14jxrhw.12

Cited by 6 publications

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“…It also offered to transfer projected savings from the changes (100 million over four years) to local law enforcement budgets in order to enhance the investigation of homicide and sex offences (California Legislative Information ). The campaign addressed concerns about fiscal costs and offered narratives of opportunity costs for both law enforcement and victims’ families if the death penalty was not abolished (Dilts , pp.109–12). However, it also proposed to suspend all litigation and appeals by existing death row prisoners.…”

Section: Revolutions and Revelations: The Decision Not To Decide And mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it also proposed to suspend all litigation and appeals by existing death row prisoners. This disregard for abolitionist hard‐won ground over the prevalence of error in capital cases was a cause for concern (Dilts ; Simon ). The opportunity costs establish and support a new victim service symbolism which promises certainty in both punishment and the severity of punishment, and appeals to the punitive reality and certainty of LWOP in the face of persistent and long‐standing challenges to the fallibility of death sentences.…”

Section: Revolutions and Revelations: The Decision Not To Decide And mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And many things will depend on how they are cleared out’ (p.459). If there is no reimagining or challenging punishment for the incorrigible, if there is an easy‐to‐reach‐for oubliette for those we cannot change then the ‘trap door through which the “incorrigible” will disappear is ready’ (Foucault , pp.460–1; Dilts ).…”

Section: Clearing Out the Roots Of Death In Punishment: New Abolitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The opportunity costs establish and support a new victim service symbolism which promises certainty in both punishment and the severity of punishment, and appeals to the punitive reality and certainty of LWOP in the face of persistent and long‐standing challenges to the fallibility of death sentences. As Dilts () argues, it promises security, safety, and harshness, in an age of austerity and limited resources. This penal rhetoric is sustained by an unchallenged moral economy of harshness and exclusion (both physical and judicial silencing) in the punishment of the worst of the worst.…”

Section: Revolutions and Revelations: The Decision Not To Decide And mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are emerging narratives reflecting on continuities with another scene of death in punishment (Gottschalk ; Ogletree and Sarat ; Adelsberg, Guenther and Zeman ), that of LWOP as a replacement for execution, where death is the expected, yet uninvited, guest at the scene of punishment. That attention must be shifted onto LWOP is a case that has been eloquently made (Gottschalk , ; Adelsberg, Guenther and Zeman ; Dilts ). Yet the death penalty's agility to survive challenges and adapt has enshrined it as both the ‘masthead symbol’ of penal harshness and ‘risk‐averse retributivism’ (Garland , p.244) and as the focus of abolitionist and reform strategies.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

Girling

2016

Howard J Crime Justice

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This article explores continuities and discontinuities between two kinds of death in punishment: of death as punishment and of death as the specified detritus of punishment, life without parole (LWOP). It traces the parallel lives and equivalencies between life and death in penal policy and practice in the US, and attendant narratives of harshness/mildness, and compromises and covenants with pasts and futures. The discourse of death that has sustained the survival of the death penalty in the US has found a home in LWOP. It argues that spectacles and memorialisations of injustice, error and pain circumscribed in the judicial and popular discourse of death as different provide spaces for reflection on dignity and cruelty, spaces in which the loss of life and liberty can be grieved, a subversive politics of mourning (Butler 2004) for those whom punishment had deemed dispensable. As the death penalty is exchanged for LWOP, reform strategies need to reimagine and recapture these spaces for grieving, and understanding the death work of LWOP in US penal politics is crucial to this endeavour.

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Section: Revolutions and Revelations: The Decision Not To Decide And mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Revolutions and Revelations: The Decision Not To Decide And mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Clearing Out the Roots Of Death In Punishment: New Abolitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Revolutions and Revelations: The Decision Not To Decide And mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

Girling

2016

Howard J Crime Justice

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Historical Modes of Perpetual Penal Confinement: Theories and Practices before Life Without Parole

Seeds¹

2019

Law Soc. Inq.

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Scholars now recognize life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) as a defining feature of contemporary American punishment. As LWOP becomes topical, it draws attention to a significant, more general phenomenon: the growth of state-sanctioned policies and practices by which prisoners face the remainder of their lives in prison. This article seeks to expand perspectives on contemporary punishment by looking closely at how lifetime incarceration took shape historically in different political projects and penal systems. Drawing from primary materials and a comprehensive review of secondary historical literature, I examine modes of perpetual penal confinement: combinations of sanctions and practices that result in holding people in state custody permanently. Interpreting classic penological paradigms anew, the article illuminates the significant role that perpetual confinement has played in influential theories of criminal justice and shows how it has proved a versatile tool for social control and prison administration across diverse penal schemes, largely because of its unique temporal character. The article concludes with a diagnosis of contemporary American punishment, suggesting that LWOP—beyond being a cruel and exclusionary penalty—is symptomatic of a system in which imprisonment until death has become uniquely ordinary.

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Disaggregating LWOP: Life Without Parole, Capital Punishment, and Mass Incarceration in Florida, 1972–1995

Seeds¹

2018

Law Soc Rev

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Over the past 40 years, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) has been transformed from a rare sanction and marginal practice of last resort into a routine punishment in the United States. Two general theses—one depicting LWOP as a direct outgrowth of death penalty abolition; another collapsing LWOP into the tough‐on‐crime sentencing policy of the mass incarceration era—serve as working explanations for this phenomenon. In the absence of in‐depth studies, however, there has been little evidence for carefully evaluating these narratives. This article provides a state‐level historical analytic account of LWOP's rise by looking to Florida—the state that uses LWOP more than any other—to explicate LWOP's specific processes and forms. Recounting LWOP's history in a series of critical junctures, the article identifies a different stimulus, showing how LWOP precipitated as Florida translated major structural upheavals that broke open traditional ways of doing and thinking about punishment. In doing so, the article reveals LWOP to be a multilayered product of incremental change, of many, sometimes disjointed and indirectly conversant, pieces. Presenting LWOP as the product of a variety of penal logics, including those prioritizing fairness and efficiency, the article more generally illustrates how very severe punishments can arise from reforms without primarily punitive purposes and in ways that were not necessarily planned.

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Death Penalty “Abolition” in Neoliberal Times:

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

Historical Modes of Perpetual Penal Confinement: Theories and Practices before Life Without Parole

Disaggregating LWOP: Life Without Parole, Capital Punishment, and Mass Incarceration in Florida, 1972–1995

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