Voices of the Incarcerated - Death by Prison by Christopher Seeds

While life and life without parole (LWOP) sentences have long been incorporated into sentencing policy, the frequency of their use has increased dramatically during the last 20 years as sentencing statues, prosecutorial practices, and parole policies have evolved in a more punitive direction. Every US State today allows for life sentences for juveniles, and 46 States are currently incarcerating juveniles serving such terms. The consequences of this trend in life sentences on society are many; the balancing of punishment and proportionality, recidivism and public safety, the cost of an aging prison population, and housing youth with adults.

What explains the shifts in penal practice and social imagination where we now imprison people until death without any reevaluation or expectation of release? Using a wide historical lens with detailed state- and institutional-level research, Death by Prison offers a provocative new foundation for questioning this deeply problematic practice that has escaped close scrutiny for too long.

"A must-read for criminal justice advocates seeking to end life sentences, as well as death penalty abolitionists inclined to view life without parole as more humane than the death penalty."

—Jose Hamza Saldana, Director, Release Aging People in Prison/RAPP Campaign

"A masterful account of how a shockingly cruel punishment became a widespread practice in the United States."

—Marie Gottschalk, author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics

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Author Christopher Seeds is Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, who hopes  the book will contribute to raising awareness of and sparking discussion and change in the practices and ways of thinking, or not thinking, about death-in-prison sentencing in the United States.

You can read a Q&A with Seeds here, and purchase Death in Prison here from the University of California Press.