Book Review: Life imprisonment: A global human rights perspective by D. Van Zyl Smit and C. Appleton

• Author: Jessica S. Henry
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567720902262
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

life, value, and role inside the prison. Throughout the book, it is the medium of ethnographic descrip-

tion that makes this work stand apart from other studies of prison life or penal conditions.

From the perspective of prison scholarship, the two main theorists that Fassin returns to through-

out are Foucault and Goffman. In the end, Fassin suggests that his work resolves a previously irrec-

oncilable tension between these two central thinkers. That is, Goffman argues that prisons, as total

institutions, are closed off from the outside world, cutoff from their connectedness to the rest of

society. By contrast, Foucault sees the prison as a place of spectacle that operates as a site at

which social and state power are exercised in both diffuse and concentrated ways. This tension,

argues Fassin, between the seeming impermeability of the total institution and the function of the

prison as a site of surveillance and punishment for the whole of society can be resolved by

viewing the prison as a dialectic form. This is what, Fassin suggests, his work give us. He states:

“First, the correctional institution is less total than it appears,”while at the same time, although per-

meable, “the carceral world does not…dissolve into the social space…. It is traversed by the reality

outside, and…it remains an irreducible fact”(p. 295). This is, indeed, the gap in the prison literature

that Fassin’sPrison World fills. This book brings to prison scholarship the story of prisons from the

ground up, providing a kind of tableau vivant of the penal scene—with all the detail that such a

“living picture”requires but sets this against the much wider context of contemporary penal and

criminal justice policy and foregoing theory. In this way, it certainly provides, as Fassin hopes it

will, a much needed reflection on the metamorphoses of the meaning of punishment. This book

would be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in understanding the

essence of what prison life and punishment mean and in the method of ethnography. It will also

be of interest to prison scholars looking for new and detailed ways of seeing in a step-by-step

fashion the ways that criminal justice, penal policy, and, ultimately, the prison fail so frequently

to achieve their stated aims of justice, rehabilitation, or social reparation.

Van Zyl Smit, D., & Appleton, C. (2019).

Life imprisonment: A global human rights perspective. Harvard University Press. 464 pp. $45. ISBN

9780674980662.

Reviewed by: Jessica S. Henry ,Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567720902262

With the abolition of capital punishment in law or in practice throughout much of the world, life

imprisonment has become the most common severe sanction imposed on people convicted of

serious crimes. Despite the prevalence of life sentences, scholarship about life imprisonment is

limited and has primarily focused on the experience of the United States. In Life Imprisonment: A

Global Human Rights Perspective, Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton fill that scholarly

void with a sweeping treatise on life imprisonment within a global human rights framework. Life

Imprisonment is a virtual treasure trove of research and analysis about life sentences. van Zyl

Smit and Appleton painstakingly collected data about the number of people imprisoned for life

around the world and the crimes for which that sentence was imposed and describe their research

findings in ways that are compelling and accessible. They offer in-depth analysis of human rights

laws and their application to life sentences, examine variations in life statutes among nation-states,

and consider judicial treatment of life imprisonment from courts around the world. van Zyl Smit and

Appleton ground their discussion in the human rights principles based on individual dignity and

hope, raising the provocative question of when, if ever, life imprisonment is an acceptable

punishment.

114 International Criminal Justice Review 32(1)