Judith Resnik — Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy - with Kristin Henning

An original transatlantic history of the invention of the corrections profession and of ensuing debates about punishment’s purposes and prisoners’ rights.Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She has authored many works, including Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms.Resnik is in conversation with Kristin Henning. Henning is a nationally recognized advocate, author, trainer, and consultant on the intersection of race, adolescence, and policing in communities of color. She is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students have been representing youth accused of crime in Washington, DC for more than 26 years. Kris was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Gault Center.Kris writes extensively about race and adolescence in the courts, including in her book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, which was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and articles such as The Reasonable Black Child: Race, Adolescence, and the Fourth Amendment. She is the co-founder of a number of initiatives to combat racial inequities in the juvenile and criminal legal systems, including the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program and a Racial Justice Toolkit for defenders. She also trains state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias in the courts and the traumatic effects of police contact and surveillance.Kris serves on the Board of Directors for the Public Welfare Foundation and has received many awards including the Juvenile Leadership Prize from the Juvenile Law Center, a Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women, and the Embracing the Legacy Award from the RFK Community Alliance.https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226754741?ic_referral=R3sfwGl4YRjik2rOB-7cOPgVN45wZAiAGKUeRm-HppEwM-dNsl3pESOikh_o0-qLP_pHW3IS_FppEDj1rX1dsRTzmqMQiZ5O0PBurPIQ7vv1aF6dQX5c54gBycmF0qFe9WnATNA