Review by Graeme Newman
 
 
 
Review by Graeme Newman, Ph.D., School of Criminal Justice, SUNY (State University of New York), Albany
Contemporary Sociology 17(5):652-653, September 1988
One finds in this book many fascinating details and fragments of arguments about criminal punishment. The style is discursive, sometimes making the author's argument and analysis of literature obscure. The reader should persist, however, since Sheleff has creatively presented many important issues rarely addressed in regular criminal punishment literature. His unique thesis gains strength from the way he develops argument around apparent paradoxes in the criminal punishment literature.
Weighing the alternatives to capital punishment
For example, today we categorically reject any use of torture as punishment. Yet he shows that the alternatives, such as life imprisonment, are often as severe or more severe in their outcomes. His general equation of life imprisonment with the death penalty is at once captivating and certainly worth considering. The death penalty, he argues, eradicates a life. But might it not also be argued that a life term deprives an individual of "life"?
Furthermore, those who actually serve out a life term are, strictly speaking, sentenced to death in prison. The argument that prison is very similar to torture is easy for him to make, particularly if one allows for the mental aspect of pain. Sheleff correctly sees that the crux of his argument rests on a careful and difficult analysis of the concept of pain. He makes an excellent beginning in examining this problem by reviewing the role of pain in both the medical model and penology, in terms of their use and avoidance of pain. Sheleff has opened up a vast avenue of research here.
How to deal with ultimate crimes?
While the book ostensibly deals with ultimate penalties, one can hardly address this issue without also considering the problem of ultimate crimes. At least, that is the way it appears, since it is difficult to think of a penalty without also envisaging its accompanying crime…
Sheleff deals with the problem of matching a punishment to an ultimate crime, such as genocide or humanicide, as well as could be expected—which is to say that he is unable to resolve the problem. The reason seems to be that society is unable to indulge in a truly matching punishment for genocide without indulging in similar behavior to that of the offender, and because of the sheer impossibility of visiting a punishment horrendous enough on one individual who has committed a crime or crimes of vast proportions.
While society says that "death is not punishment enough," society is not prepared to go beyond this penalty to, say, the aggravated forms of death used in the seventeenth century and before such as drawing and quartering or disemboweling. But perhaps life imprisonment is punishment beyond the death penalty, as Sheleff argues, in that it does allow, from his point of view, for the repeated "killing" (i.e., the deprivation of life) of the offender every day he spends in prison.
Offering the prisoner a choice
Clearly, Sheleff himself finds ultimate penalties too much for any crime, even an ultimate crime. But his conclusion is quite challenging: that the offender should be given the choice of ultimate punishments. He mostly confines this discussion to a choice between the death penalty and life imprisonment, leaving out the possibility that the offender might prefer torture to either of the other two penalties (though he does consider castration for rape).
His solution raises many new and provocative questions. How a prisoner, by definition most decidedly unfree, can make a fee choice is a very difficult question. And allowing the offender to choose raises the serious concern that responsibility—and thus accountability—for punishment is shifted away from the state.
What range of possible punishments should be allowed the offender? While a life term and death are relatively straightforward choices, other in-between choices are more complex. Would an hour on the rack be worth several years in prison? What about donating a kidney to get early parole? One rape = ten years = castration? Could a repeated shoplifter choose to have a finger removed for each conviction instead of doing time? If he really means to give the accused a choice, then these issues would surely arise. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
Recommended for open-minded readers
I recommend this book to those who are prepared to think openly and without prejudice about criminal punishment.
 

 
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