Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process

by Robert Johnson

* Very frank insiders look at the use of the death penalty in modern America and promotes idea that the death penalty is a dehumanizing process...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0534128289
• ISBN13: 9780534128289
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing
• Length: 174 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

educational

this book is very informative on the subject of the death penalty. after my college course i kept the book i think just to hang on to. after 4 years i haven't opened it again but i still remember things that i learned from it.

Illuminating

Regardless of your views on the importance of incarceration to incapacitate offenders, this book is brilliantly researched and powerful. Mr. Kocevic apparently didn't like this book because of a general sense that criminals deserve what they get because they are all psychopaths (not an argument substantiated by any hard data about the composition of prisons and even death rows) - and that we should all want the death penalty to prevent recidivism (I'm not sure whether he is aware that almost every state has - and instructs jurors on - the existence of life without the possibility of parole). However, this book will service to educate even people who support capital punishment - it is important that in a democracy, we are each aware of the acts that the State commits on our behalf, and the way in which the State commits them. This book makes clear that the institution of death row in this country is beneath the dignity of our society.

A contemporary classic

Robert Johnson's Death Work is a contemporary classic. Focusing on the execution process itself it, perhaps better than any other book, illustrates one of the most neglected arguments against capital punishment: that, far from somehow being the simple taking of "a life for a life," it is MORE cruel, MORE degrading, than any murder committed in real life could ever be. As Albert Camus wrote: "For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life." Johnson's book is an extended illustration of the exact way this point is currently valid in the United States. (I wonder, by the way, what reviewer Alan Kocevic does in Sweden, which is one of the least favourable countries in the whole world to capital punishment.)

A well-researched, well-written account of the death penalty

This is an excellent book to use for research or to learn more about the death penalty. The author did an outstanding job of presenting the facts about death row and explaining why the death penalty should be abolished. He not only discusses how death row inmates are psychologically tortured, but how guards who must watch these men and women are also adversely affected by carrying out their jobs--the legal, premeditated murder of another human. Johnson explores the reasons for popular support for the death penalty, and believes that offenders should be punished, not killed for retribution. This is an amazing book which will affect anyone who takes the time to read it through, even those who staunchly support the death penalty.