This text is a frank look at the consequences of the death penalty in the United States. It takes the reader through the world of American executions, from the prisoners who spend years on death row to the prison staff who guard the condemned and the people who are executioners. Utilizing both ethnographic and quantitative research, this book creates a dramatic presentation of all sides of this controversial topic.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A well-researched, well-written account of the death penalty,
By A Customer
This review is from: Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process (Wadsworth Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice) (Paperback)
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.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A contemporary classic,
By T. P. Uschanov (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process (Wadsworth Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice) (Paperback)
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.)
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
educational,
This review is from: Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process (Wadsworth Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice) (Paperback)
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.
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