The revelations of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and more recently at Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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.
Colin Dayan (also known as 'Joan Dayan'), born in Atlanta, Georgia, spent most of her adult life away from the South until her return in 2004 to Nashville, Tennessee.
Before coming to Vanderbilt in 2004 as the Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities, she taught at Yale University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, University of Arizona, Princeton Univesity, and the University of Pennsylvania.Her books include A Rainbow for the Christian West: Introducing René Depestre's Poetry (1977) and Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (1987). Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995, 1998), brings history, literature, and religion into dialogue through an examination of Haitian historiography and vodou. The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT Press, 2007) gives a legal history to the worst excesses of the current war on terror. Her articles have appeared in dozens of scholarly books and journals such as Research in African Literatures, World Literature Today, Raritan, Southwest Review, Yale French Studies, and The Yale Review. Her new book The Law is a White Dog -- how the rituals of law make and unmake persons -- was published by Princeton University Press in Spring 2011 and selected by CHOICE as one of top 25 books for 2011.
In his review of The Law is a White Dog published in The Times Higher Education Supplement, Conor Gearty writes: "Dayan succeeds mightily in her dismal project. The tale is told via death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, rape by 'correctional officers,' a rare first-hand report on the horrors of supermax prisons, and much else besides....The book is defined by three extraordinary strengths. First, its moral force is as direct as that of Charles Dickens, Emile Zola or Henry Mayhew. Its controlled anger reminded me of No Logo, Naomi Klein's great critique of international capitalism. Second, I have never read a better use made of case law: Dayan knows the importance of legal decisions but is not bound by them, and is always aware that their hinterland matters much more than their formal prose....Third and best, the book takes the margins and makes them central: the 131 prisoners force-fed in Guantanamo; the 40 percent of African-American men disenfranchised in states with the most restrictive voting laws; the indefinite solitary confinement in supermax prisons....these features help to make it a triumph of style as well as of substance."
An excerpt from the review in American Literature:
"A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood."
