Extreme Punishment Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement

Extreme Punishment examines the erosion of the legal boundaries that traditionally divide civil detention from criminal punishment. This collection of empirical studies illustrates how the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants are treated as criminals in three of the world's oldest and wealthiest democracies: Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each chapter relies on unprecedented access to the administrative black holes that increasingly characterize punishment. Together, the contributors explore how punishers exert power and how the punished experience that power. The book demonstrates that, through consolidated administrative power, new laws nominally focused on managing risk and preventing harm produce new criminal categories and newly criminalized people.

Keramet Reiter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society and the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, USA.
 
Alexa Koenig is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, USA.

Foreword; Marc Mauer

Introduction; Alexa Koenig and Keramet Reiter

1. Fear-Suffused Hell-Holes: The Architecture of Extreme Punishment; Yvonne Jewkes

2. The Limits of Punishment; Emma Kaufman and Sam Weiss

3. Immigration Detention and the Expansion of Penal Power in the United Kingdom; Mary Bosworth and Sarah Turnbull

4. (Im)migrating Penal Excess: Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Case of Maricopa County, Arizona; Mona Lynch

5. A New 'Ecology of Cruelty'? The Changing Shape of Maximum Security Custody in England and Wales; Alison Liebling

6. Seclusive Space: Crisis Confinement, and Behavior Modification in Canadian Forensic Psychiatric Settings; Stuart J. Murray and Dave Holmes

7. Normalizing Exceptions: Solitary Confinement and the Micro-Politics of Risk/Need; Kelly Hannah-Moffat and Amy Klassen

8. Making Visible Invisible Suffering: Non-Deliberative Agency and the Bodily Rhetoric of Tamms Supermax Prisoners; Nadya Pittendrigh

9. Punishing Mental Illness: Trans-Institutionalization and Solitary Confinement in the United States; Keramet Reiter and Thomas Blair

10. Between Protection and Punishment: The Irregular Arrival Regime in Canadian Refugee Law; Efrat Arbel

11. From Man to Beast: Social Death at Guantánamo; Alexa Koenig

Afterword: Hadar Aviram