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Extreme Punishment examines the erosion of the legal boundaries that traditionally divide civil detention from criminal punishment. This collection of empirical studies illustrates how the mentally ill, non-citizen immigrants, and enemy combatants are treated as criminals in three of the world's oldest and wealthiest democracies: Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each chapter relies on unprecedented access to the administrative black holes that increasingly characterize punishment. Together, the contributors explore how punishers exert power and how the punished experience that power. The book demonstrates that, through consolidated administrative power, new laws nominally focused on managing risk and preventing harm produce new criminal categories and newly criminalized people.
