The Culture of the Condemned: Pastoral Execution and Life on Death Row in the 1930s

Abstract

Between 1830 and 1930, the removal of legal and extralegal executions from public view in the United States bolstered the law’s efficiency while expanding its reach. Scholars have focused on external political effects, largely ignoring the lives of the condemned in the modern killing states. As they were withdrawn ever further behind prison walls, the condemned rearticulated the meanings of their deaths, which would to exceed, to whatever extent possible, new biopolitical regimes. An examination of inmate culture reveals death row as a site of subtle, supple struggle between the modern state and those it would kill.