Normalizing Extreme Imprisonment

The concluding Chapter 5 offers a new explanation for how reforms and those driving them can end up normalizing, in the sense of making the public view as acceptable, incredibly severe punitive practices. While not responsible for activating mechanisms of normalization, some death penalty abolitionists have nonetheless helped to maintain and reinforce them. In the shadow of the traditional death penalty, an inhumane form of punishment has proliferated and been championed by a range of penal progressive reformers. This chapter then brings the story to the present. It shows how LWOP is developing in other states and the rest of the world and discusses the dangers of using life imprisonment to challenge LWOP.