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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

Girling, Evi

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 Thumbnail


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Abstract

The paper explores continuities and discontinuities between two kinds of death in punishment; of death as punishment and of death as the specified detritus of punishment (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 that punishment had deemed dispensable. As the death penalty is exchanged for LWOP, reform strategies need to re-imagine and re-capture these spaces for grieving and understanding the death work of LWOP in US penal politics is crucial to this endeavour.

Acceptance Date Mar 4, 2016
Publication Date Sep 6, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice
Print ISSN 2059-1101
Publisher Wiley
Volume 55
Issue 3
Pages 345-361
Series Title Special Issue: Death in Punishment
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12174
Publisher URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12174

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