Abstract
Life Without Parole (LWOP) is now the popular alternative sanction to the death penalty. It pleases the desire for severity by acting as a life-ending sentence, while also appeasing death penalty abolitionists because LWOP is not literally a life-ending sentence. What Vannier sets out to do in this impressive book is to remind us in the most explicit way that LWOP is another form of death sentence, and to bring into sharper relief the various confluence of progressive campaigns and punitive objectives that have led to the proliferation of this most excessive penal sanction. As such, how has LWOP become normalised within the US penal system?
The book is interested in different perceptions and attitudes of the key actors and their struggles to make and remake their penal systems. Chapter 1 traces the history of LWOP, and in careful empirical detail describes the legislative activities and campaigning of groups that championed LWOP and that have since sought to expand its remit. Vannier makes clear that LWOP was being used by both penal reformers and punitive legislators to achieve their ends. Vannier is careful here in making this point, showing the various actors that shaped LWOP and examining how the death penalty’s continued existence — and the fractious debates about its abolition — have imbued LWOP with the air of a sensible alternative. LWOP is thus not, as she states ‘the result of two distinct struggles’ but was the result of how death penalty abolition (LWOP Saves lives) and punitive campaigns (LWOP increases penal measures) overlapped and gave LWOP broad acceptability. This leads Vannier to the conclusion that LWOP’s continued existence is seen by some as necessary if the death penalty is to be abolished (p.47).
Chapter 2 discusses the anti-death penalty campaigns that have determined LWOP’s acceptability by working to replace rather than abolish the death penalty. In this context, LWOP is considered a humane alternative. Vannier then brings the reader inside the courtroom in chapter 3, navigating a complex system of sentencing mechanisms and plea bargaining. The courtroom discourse and sentencing processes reinforce that LWOP is the lesser, merciful option. LWOP is a victory for the defence.
But while these institutional practices and campaigning efforts have combined to normalise LWOP imprisonment, Vannier suggests that the harm suffered by people serving these sentences is overlooked and ultimately forgotten. In Chapter 4 she makes a fairly unusual move in studies of policy and takes account of the lived experience of LWOP, and in doing so, expands our understandings of life in deep imprisonment. People sentenced to LWOP experience a procedural death due to being denied access to legal safeguard and due process rights attached to the death penalty. They also suffer a carceral social death, that hopelessness of never being allowed to re-enter society, permanently cut off from the ordinariness of the world. And then, finally, of course, embodied death. This is among the book’s strongest chapters as it reveals a harrowing and ultimately haunting account of being beyond hope. Prisoners may have been saved from the death penalty, but they are condemned to purgatory, ‘not quite fully alive, not completely dead’, as one of Vannier’s participants tells her (p.135). LWOP is interminable. The book’s conclusion is somewhat open-ended, given that while the US’s use of the death penalty may be in a process of slow abolition, LWOP continues to dramatically rise. This remains an urgent issue.
While this is a brief summary, it should be clear that Normalizing Imprisonment is exceptionally thorough, based on extensive research. Vannier has set a new bar for how we trace the life of a penal policy, from the lobbying, to the legislation, the institutionalisation, sentencing, and onto the pains of imprisonment itself. The book also makes a methodological contribution to pains of imprisonment literature by showing the value of letters to reach corners of the carceral system that can otherwise be out of reach. While this is a neat volume, the book feels like a definitive account that will be indispensable to those wishing to make sense of this peculiar penal institution.
For those of us interested in making a progressive policy impact and aiming for practical reforms, Vannier provides us with much to reflect upon. Certainly, as someone who has been involved in penal reform movements, there was something troubling that is recognisable here. Penal reform is not just about alternative ideas, but a battle to win hearts and minds. In a world where penal policy is increasingly delivered as soundbites (think Prison Works or Three-strikes-and-you’re-out), the tendency is not to recomplicate the narrative, but instead to show that your alternative progressive vision is as simple to understand and as unchallenging to digest. And penal reform often has an expedience and single issue focus to it too: we must stop that prison being built; women need a different penal response; that legislation needs to be blocked now; the death penalty needs to be abolished before another person is killed; this person's execution must be commuted before it is too late. This book spoke to some of my own concerns about doing penal reform: that often the most successful campaigns tend to deal with a combination of the most readily sympathetic prisoners and offensive penal practices. Hence, leaving aside the more difficult groups and morally ambiguous cases and concerns, therefore detaching those (potentially) winable policy problems from a view of the system as a whole. We present ostensibly alternative plans, but as a result, implicitly, and inadvertently, these campiagns can align to the dominant mores that some people are worthy of extreme punishment,and hence legitmize uses of punishment elsewhere in the penal system. We may win reform here and now, but is it really radical progress when we subtly reinforce other punitive attitudes?
Thinking there are easy answers to this would defy the point, and Vannier avoids this trap, alluring as it clearly is. Vannier’s account is a reminder that the best criminological research can add insight and new understanding that allows us to reframe the debates around penal policy. And here, what she does is to show us that the problem of LWOP is not merely a problem of legislation, or of rising numbers of people serving LWOP sentences (though of course it is those things too), it is about trying to reduce the human suffering inside our prison systems. We should not lose sight of those who are most directly impacted by LWOP. Rather than pick over the rationales behind either LWOP or execution, what we require then is a more fundamental, encompassing and complicated debate: “how should we, as members of different societies, punish those who commit the most serious crimes?’ (p.166).
Dr Louise Brangan is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Criminology at the University of Strathclyde, UK. Louise.Brangan@strath.ac.uk