Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of September. I'm Emily Bazelan. I am here with Yale law professor Judith Bresnik to talk about her amazing transatlantic history of punishment within prison walls.

The book is called impermissible Punishments.

Judith, thanks so much for joining us.

I'm delighted to be here.

Thank you.

So you tell this history to ask a central question.

What do governments committed to equality owed to the people they detain?

And you're also making an argument about why, in your view,

many contemporary forms of punishment should end. I wanted to start with a central incident in your

book, and I think inspiration for writing this book, which is a remarkable trial that took place

in Arkansas in the 1960s. And it was a challenge to the practice

of whipping that a few prisoners in Arkansas brought on their own behalf. Tell us this story and

why it grabbed you so much. As far as I know, Winston Talley was a very ordinary guy with low-level crimes, and he asked a federal judge smuggling his papers out of the prison to stop the whip.

And I was taken him back because I didn't know that prisoners were whipped, and I was yet taken aback twice by the opinion. One part of it is that a federal

judge in Arkansas appointed the best lawyers in the state, the leaders of the bar, to represent him.

And the second is, so, and the judge said, yes, you have a right to be in court. And then the judge

said, but no, prisoners a right to be in court. And then the judge said, but no,

prisoners can be whipped by state officials for not picking enough okra or for cucumbers or

whatever as long as it wasn't arbitrary and limited to 10 lashes because it wasn't cruel and

unusual punishment. So basically the facts here are that prisoners are being routinely whipped for not doing

farm work, which is they're being assigned to do, right? What kind of work was this?

Farm work sounds way too cheerful. These people were made to be in the fields with sweat,

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