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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms
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The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R290
Discovery Miles 2 900
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The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Hardcover)
Series: Boston Review Books
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List price R362
Loot Price R290
Discovery Miles 2 900
You Save R72 (20%)
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A searing indictment of the American penal system that finds the
roots of the recent prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in
the steady dismantling of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of
"cruel and unusual" punishment. The revelations of prisoner abuse
and torture at Abu Ghraib and more recently at Guantanamo were
shocking to most Americans. And those who condemned the treatment
of prisoners abroad have focused on U.S. military procedures and
abuses of executive powers in the war on terror, or, more
specifically, on the now-famous White House legal counsel memos on
the acceptable limits of torture. But in The Story of Cruel and
Unusual, Colin Dayan argues that anyone who has followed U.S.
Supreme Court decisions regarding the Eighth Amendment prohibition
of "cruel and unusual" punishment would recognize the prisoners'
treatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as a natural extension of
the language of our courts and practices in U.S. prisons. In fact,
it was no coincidence that White House legal counsel referred to a
series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s and 1990s in making
its case for torture.Dayan traces the roots of "acceptable" torture
to slave codes of the nineteenth century that deeply embedded the
dehumanization of the incarcerated in our legal system. Although
the Eighth Amendment was interpreted generously during the
prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, this period
of judicial concern was an anomaly. Over the last thirty years,
Supreme Court decisions have once again dismantled Eighth Amendment
protections and rendered such words as "cruel" and "inhuman"
meaningless when applied to conditions of confinement and treatment
during detention. Prisoners' actual pain and suffering have been
explained away in a rhetorical haze-with rationalizations, for
example, that measure cruelty not by the pain or suffering
inflicted, but by the intent of the person who inflicted it. The
Story of Cruel and Unusual is a stunningly original work of legal
scholarship, and a searing indictment of the U.S. penal system.
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