Democracy's Punishment Problem

Arkansas legally whipped prisoners until 1968. Today, U.S. officials celebrate images from El Salvador’s concentration camp-style prisons while federal courts abandon “evolving standards of decency” for 1790s baselines. Yale Law Professor Judith Resnik, author of book Impermissible Punishments, talks to me about how prisons maintain structural ties to plantations and argues democratic governments cannot “set out to ruin people.” A urgent conversation about what we owe those we cage—and whether mass incarceration is collapsing under its own weight.

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