ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up two invitations presented in Modernity and the Holocaust. First, to consider how human rights disasters that fall short of the magnitude of the Holocaust may develop out of the same 'civilized' conditions. Second, to consider the potential for contemporary constitutional law, infused with human rights law, as a 'new and improved' shield for resisting the intrinsic danger posed by modern democratic bureaucracies. The chapter considers mass incarceration in the United States (US) at the end of the twentieth century as an example of a sub-Holocaust human rights catastrophe. It argues that the influence of modern human rights law on national constitutional law is a more promising candidate that has emerged since the Holocaust. The 'evolving standards of decency' doctrine under the Eighth Amendment, and the concept of human dignity said to underlie it, offers no talisman that can prevent advanced bureaucratic democracies from engaging in systematic cruelty.
