Live From Death Row
I found Live From Death Row quite disturbing yet very informative. I learned a lot of new things after reading this narrative. The lives of convicts on death row seem very morbid and very useless. The men on death row know their going to die in prison. This must be a horrible feeling. I am not sure if I would be able to handle the fact that I knew when i was going to die. Conditions in the jail do not help either. I was very surprised by some of these conditions. First they do give the convicts free time. They let them go for a short while to get away from the death row living. The convicts are allowed to watch TV but are not allowed type writers, which is wierd to me. I guess this is a safety precaution yet I don’t understand why they can’t just have supervised time on one. Another thing that disturbed me was the no contact rule. I don’t agree with this at all. A direct quote from the narrative is “The ultimate effect of noncontact visits is to weaken, and finally sever, family ties”. I think this is wrong and inhuman. To keep a man from seeing his family when the man knows he’s never going to be able to see them out of jail is wrong. These men are going to die by the hands of the prison system and they can’t even have contact with their loved ones.
I do agree with the narrative that for a bad enough crime a man should be put to death. This does not mean I agree with the inhuman treatment of that man until his death. This narrative is very one-sided and does not touch upon the other side of things.
ah, I think I know the article to which you refer.
My roomate, a fairly acomplished poet, was looking into getting the records, in hopes of being able to reconstruct poetry from these stories.
Your use of narrative is a bit vague though; because the records of the prisoner’s last 48 hours are, in fact narratives, and while articles/essays tend to have a narrative structure, that “through line” if you will tends to get called an argument. Having said that, Dramatica, one of the major “story theory” paradigms (read: formula) refer’s to the plot as the argument. You can’t win either way.
The one thing that seems painfully clear in this situation is that there isn’t a hell of a lot of extra humanity to go around, here.
The only thing I could think about when my roomate read the article to me, was the begining of Discipline and Punish (Foucault). It makes it so clear that the punishing isn’t for the guilty, it’s for the rest of us, so we know not to stray too far.
Cheers,
Tycho
Comment by celchu19 — October 15, 2006 @ 7:23 am