Keele Research Repository

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.