Linda Ross Meyer, “Sentencing in Time” (Amherst College Press, 2017)

New Books in Law · Jul 3, 2018 · 57m

If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) physical violence—whipping, beating, branding, amputation, and killing—to one that uses confinement. It is a mark of our “civility” that we no longer “hurt” people to get them to do what we want; instead, we put them in jails and prisons. We sentence them to “do time,” that time being a period of confinement away from, well, pretty much everybody. In her thought-provoking book Sentencing in Time (Amherst College Press, 2017), Linda Ross Meyer examines…