Facing the Death Penalty: Essays on a Cruel and Unusual Punishment

12. Working the Dead

12 Working the Dead JONATHAN R. SORENSEN AND JAMES W. MARQUART Death Row is deeded to the notion that these men, of all the criminals in the penitentiary, are special. They are the ones society has said are not capable or deserving of redemption or reform.... To give them schooling, training, or therapy would create an ambiguity the system is not ready to manage and which it has no desire to have become overt: it would acknowledge that residence on the Row is still tentative. In order to deal with the Rowand what it means, the prison system adopts the posture ofthe inmate who says, "We're here for one thing: we're here to die." (Jackson and Christian, 1980:27) The previous excerpt exemplifies the relative nonstatus ofdeath row prisoners. They are segregated from the general inmate population and simply "warehoused for death" (Johnson, 1981). Death row inhabitants are in limbo, and time spent on death row is a period of waiting. Forgotten by society, these persons are left to die a slow death before being legally executed by the state. Little attention is paid to death row prisoners, with the exception of occasional news flashes about appe~s, stays, or executions. Pretending that these prisoners do not exist ignores the reality that death rows across America are holding more people now than ever before, and confining them for much longer periods oftime. Also ob169 170 JONATHAN R. SORENSEN AND JAMES W. MARQUART scured is the fact that executions have become a rarity, and reversals the norm. Since Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 239 [1972]), and its companion case, Branch v. Texas, the new Texas capital statute, implemented in 1973 (affirmed byJurek v. Texas, 428 U. S. 262 [1976]), has resulted in 389 death sentences. Yet as of 1 March 1988, only 27 persons have been executed; 266 remain on death row; and ofthe remaining 96, several have died of natural causes or suicide and the rest have had their cases reversed or sentences commuted. For the executed prisoners, time spent on death row ranged from 2.10 years to 11.23 years, and the average was 6.31 years. Behavior of Death Row Inmates Death row inmates have always been heavily guarded in the belief that they represent a danger to others. Just how much of a threat has rarely been examined. One way researchers contend with this problem is by studying the amount of violent behavior exhibited by inmates who committed capital offenses but did not receive a death sentence. After reviewing the rate of violent acts committed by such inmates, Thorsten Sellin concluded that "[P]rison homicides are not usually committed by prisoners serving sentences for capital murder and that such persons, whether in prison or on parole, pose no special threat to the safety of their fellowmen" (1980: 120). Some argue that even if death row inmates were no more violent than other first-degree murderers in prison, confinement on death row has distorted their personalities to such an extent as to make them dangerous. That is, the rigors of death row itself create violent men. A statement made by two psychiatrists studying death row inhabitants prior to the Furman decision best expresses this point of view. Gallemore and Panton claimed that "The [death row] occupants over time become progressively less suitable for reentry into the general prison population or the general public" (1972: 171). They warned of the danger death row inhabitants would present to prisoners, keepers, and the general public if the death penalty was not reinstated. The psychological pressures ofdeath row confinement are multitudinous , although it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss them (see Jackson and Christian, 1980, for an excellent ethnography of death row in Texas and Brasfield and Elliot, 1983, for a first-hand WORKING THE DEAD 171 account oflife there). The amazing finding ofstudies on the psychology of death row is that the inmates show an enormous amount of "human resilience and adaptability" (Johnson, 1980:561) and cope with their environment without becoming violent (Bluestone and McGahee, 1962). The ultimate test of how these individuals behave when they are not under the strict security of death row occurs when they are released into the general prison population or into society. The results of one such natural experiment were documented by Tom Murton (1969) when he became warden ofan Arkansas penitentiary and released death...