Life Without Parole: America's New Death Penalty?

Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as "the new death penalty." Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.

ISBN-13: 9780814762486

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: New York University Press

Publication Date: 06-04-2012

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.90d

Series: The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Race and Justice

Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. (Editor)
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. He is the author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (WW Norton and Company, 2004) and Co-Author of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America.

Austin Sarat (Editor)
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He has collaborated with Charles J. Ogletree on numerous works for NYU Press, including Racial Reconciliation and the Healing of a Nation: Beyond Law and Rights, Punishment in Popular Culture, When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice, The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States, and From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. He is also the co-editor of Guns in Law, Criminals and Enemies, Law's Mistakes, Reimagining "To Kill a Mockingbird" Family, . Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under Law, and many others.