Carol Steiker, 'To See a World in a Grain of Sand': Dignity and Indignity in American Criminal Justice, in The Punitive Imagination: Law, Justice, and Responsibility 19 (Austin Sarat ed., Univ. Ala. Press 2014).
Abstract: The starting point for this symposium is the striking punitive turn that has occurred in the United States over the past forty years—a change in public discourse and public policy that has yielded a staggering increase in the rate of incarceration, along with other dramatic changes such as the rise of the “supermax” prison, the proliferation of mandatory sentences and sentences of life without parole, the increasing treatment of juvenile offenders...