Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

Abstract

This article explores continuities and discontinuities between two kinds of death in punishment: of death as punishment and of death as the specified detritus of punishment, life without parole (LWOP). It traces the parallel lives and equivalencies between life and death in penal policy and practice in the US, and attendant narratives of harshness/mildness, and compromises and covenants with pasts and futures. The discourse of death that has sustained the survival of the death penalty in the US has found a home in LWOP. It argues that spectacles and memorialisations of injustice, error and pain circumscribed in the judicial and popular discourse of death as different provide spaces for reflection on dignity and cruelty, spaces in which the loss of life and liberty can be grieved, a subversive politics of mourning (Butler 2004) for those whom punishment had deemed dispensable. As the death penalty is exchanged for LWOP, reform strategies need to reimagine and recapture these spaces for grieving, and understanding the death work of LWOP in US penal politics is crucial to this endeavour.

When Prisoners’ “Right to Die” Goes Online: A Case-Study of Legal and Penal Sensibilities

“…Historically, capital punishment entailed the spectacularization of death, where the state-power that effected death was configured through the sovereign who made highly visible life-and-death decisions over subjects (Foucault 1977; Povinelli 2009). To some extent, this spectacular death persists in contemporary examples of capital punishment, namely in the United States, even though death has been “humanized” through the “medicalised aesthetics” of lethal injection (Girling 2016, 355). Namely, legal challenges to capital punishment, and the “ensuing spectacle of mitigation, delay, mercy (and its denial)” (Girling 2016, 354) can re-focus penal sensibilities among the US public on capital punishment.…”

Historical Modes of Perpetual Penal Confinement: Theories and Practices before Life Without Parole

“…This is not only because the use of LWOP, an emergent form of perpetual confinement, has quintupled in recent decades. More, scholars assert, LWOP captures the zeitgeist of contemporary US punishment (Dolovich 2012;Simon 2012Simon , 2014Dilts 2015;Girling 2016;Dichter 2017). Jonathan Simon (2012Simon ( , 2014 shows that LWOP epitomizes a punitive and zero-risk way of thinking about and carrying out punishment (what he dubs "total incapacitation") that undergirds mass incarceration.…”

Discerning Penal Values and Judicial Decision Making: The Case of Whole Life Sentencing in Europe and the United States of America

“…As Sarat and Ogletree () describe, life without parole sentencing came about through a strategic alignment of death penalty abolitionists and politicians seeking to demonstrate their credentials as tough on crime (see also Girling ). The shadow of the death penalty looms large over the origins and use of the sentences, with concerns also being expressed that the same end result – death – is not subject to the same legal rigours as necessitated by the processes surrounding the use of capital punishment (Dolovich ).…”