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How should we punish criminals? In Impermissible Punishments, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Judith Resnik, provides a historical narrative of punishment in European and American prisons. Tracing the evolution from Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian Panopticon through post-World War II human rights frameworks, Resnik argues that punishment systems developed as a transatlantic rather than uniquely American project. Her analysis reveals how prisoners themselves, not reformers, first articulated the concept of retained rights during detention. Resnik’s new book chronicles a crucial divergence after the 1980s, when European systems maintained stronger human rights commitments while American prisons retreated from recognizing prisoners as rights-bearing individuals, thereby making prison a problem for its democracy. 1. Prison systems developed as a transatlantic project, not American innovation Punishment theories and practices emerged from shared Enlightenment thinking across Europe and America i