Jeremy Bentham’s Understanding of the Need for and Angst about Prisoners’ “Eligibility” for Resources

This session will discuss facets of Judith Resnik’s forthcoming book, Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy, to be published in the summer of 2025 by the University of Chicago Press. Given the interests of the Bentham Center, her focus will be on his role as a pioneering political theorist, joining a pantheon of now famous white European men—including Cesare Beccaria, Bentham, John Howard, Gustave de Beaumont, Alexander de Tocqueville, and Frances Lieber—who put punishment on the map of social inquiry. Probing punishment’s utilities, moralities, and aims, these men were innovative sociologists and activists. They called on governments to justify punishments as rationally related to legitimate ends, including (in contemporary terms) retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. And, again using contemporary nomenclature, they were “abolitionists” in the sense that each called for the end of some punishments then seen to be normal exercises of state power. As is familiar, they heralded penitentiaries as a great Enlightenment reform to displace the “barbarous” practices of branding, executing, and exiling individuals convicted of crimes. Resnik will discuss Bentham’s attention to the challenges of “giving” prisoners resources (food, health care, clothes, shelter) that others did not receive from government and his understanding of the emotional responses that the resulting “eligibility” for support evoked.

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Founding Director of the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law. She teaches courses on federalism, procedure, courts, prisons, equality, and citizenship. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship of democratic values to government services such as courts, prisons, and post offices; the role of collective redress and class actions; contemporary conflicts over privatization; the relationships of states to citizens and non-citizens; the interaction among federal, state, and tribal courts and the forms and norms of federalism; practices of punishment; and equality and gender.

Recent book chapters include Class in Courts: Incomplete Equality’s Challenges for the Legitimacy of Procedural Systems in A Guide to Civil Procedure: Integrating Critical Legal Perspectives (Brooke Coleman, Suzette Malveaux, Portia Pedro, and Elizabeth Porter, eds., 2022). Constituting a Civil Legal System Called “Just”: Law, Money, Power, and Publicity, in New Pathways to Civil Justice in Europe (Xandra Kramer, Alexandre Biard, Jos Hoevenaars, and Erlis Themeli, eds., Springer, 2021); Not Isolating Isolation, in Solitary Confinement: History, Effects, and Pathways to Reform (Jules Lobel and Peter Scharff-Smith, eds., Oxford University Press, 2020); Judicial Methods of Mediating Conflicts: Recognizing and Accommodating Differences in Pluralist Legal Regimes in Judicial Power: How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformations (Christine Landfried, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2019); The Functions of Publicity and of Privatization in Courts and Their Replacements (from Jeremy Bentham to #MeToo and Google Spain) in Open Justice: The Role of Courts in a Democratic Society (Burkhard Hess and Ana Koprivica, eds., Max Planck Institute, Luxembourg, Nomos, 2019); and Courts and Economic and Social Rights/Courts as Economic and Social Rights, in The Future of Economic and Social Rights (Katharine G. Young, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2019).