Matthew Clair, Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court

Abstract

underscoring: the death penalty is one among other factors that contribute to the development of life without parole. This is not only to say that there is more to LWOP’s story than capital punishment but also to recognize that what occurs outside the strict confines of the death penalty field can nevertheless influence the field and therefore matters for how researchers interpret what abolitionists do and say. To acknowledge this broader scope is not to take away from the book’s accomplishments, but it is to note that there are historically significant aspects of LWOP’s development that an account looking solely at capital punishment will not be able to show. Underplayed here, for example, is how for much of the twentieth century life without parole was not a punishment so certain to end with death in prison; its practices and meanings have changed over time. As it begins, the book ultimately returns to the words of people serving LWOP, drawing on 299 letters from incarcerated men and women, as a source for interpreting how the punishment is experienced. The letters shed light on LWOP’s cruelties, its pains, and bring to the study a gravity that documentary sources and elite interviews alone could not. It is one of the book’s unique contributions: to juxtapose the acts and rhetoric of California lawmakers, abolitionist organizers, and litigants—who by turns downplay and accentuate LWOP’s severity in a struggle for votes and legal victories —with the effects on those for whom the punishment is not a matter of strategy or politics, but of everyday life.