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

Abstract

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.

Governing against the tide: Populism, power and the party conference

“…Loader and Sparks (2016: 319) build the case for a more fully 'political criminology' that recognises ideological politics as the most appropriate arena for contesting and determining answers to the crime question. Seeds (2019) has traced the historical manifestations of lifelong incarceration through a succession of penological paradigms, while Campbell's (2018) careful historical work on state level penal trends in the United States of America has illuminated how penal culture, institutional structures, partisan politics, and intergroup factors coalesce at a local level to shape penal policy outcomes. Campbell and Schoenfeld's (2013) highly influential work on the political sociology of punishment has emphasised the importance of careful historical periodization and greater analytical sensitivity to how national developments interact with state specific institutional contexts to produce political innovation and legislative experimentation in the penal field.…”

Life Sentences and Perpetual Confinement

“…However, as reformers of that era and contemporary scholars alike have emphasized, the indeterminate sentencing model was a two-sided affair with a "double soul" (Pifferi 2016). For if a prisoner was deemed to have failed their chance (Wines 1904), a decision often laden with racial stereotype and prejudice (Dichter 2017), social protection would outweigh rehabilitation and result in lifetime confinement (Reitz 2012, Seeds 2019a). From the late nineteenth century through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, US states adopted indeterminate sentencing to varying extents (Reitz 2012, Rhine et al 2017, and a "congruity of philosophy and practice across the country remained in place until the 1970s" (Van Zyl Smit & Corda 2017, p. 426).…”

“…The section ends by assessing the value of using perpetual confinement as an analytical frame (rather than a category limited to formal life sentences). Such an alternative categorization-whether labeled death in prison (Henry 2012), perpetual confinement (Seeds 2019a), or otherwise-may more accurately capture what is important and provide a more meaningful baseline for social science research, legal challenges, and policy reform.…”

“…Is the object in question a legal category (life sentences) or a penal phenomenon (perpetual confinement)? Should we think of death in prison or perpetual confinement as a type of punishment (Henry 2012, Seeds 2019a)? These questions are more than academic.…”