My friend always says that a disproportionate number of weird things happen to me.
For example, for four summers I worked as a bellhop at a relatively nice hotel just outside of Boston. During my time there:
I allowed a man who claimed to be a professional "chair repairman" to take all of the chairs out of the main lobby and put them into his van. Two-and-a-half-years later, the chairs still have not been recovered.
I chased a legless woman down the big hill leading up to the hotel after the woman's daughter got distracted, let go of the woman's wheelchair and proceeded not to notice as her mother rolled away.
I was approached early one morning by a man who told me that he had been jogging in the woods behind the hotel and had seen a dead body lying under a tree. He had sort of a strange smile on his face, so I thought he was joking around. In hindsight, I guess the smile was just the result of the shock of seeing a dead body lying under a tree.
Last semester, I began a project, documenting the lives of two death row inmates at North Carolina's Central Prison. The experience has been richly rewarding. It also has been stranger than the chair repairman, the rolling woman and the smiling jogger combined.
That's because death row is one crazy, backward, screwy place. It's a place rich with awful (and sometimes darkly comic) stories, guards with varying levels of sanity and men who have little left to live for.
But what about what death row isn't? Despite what you see in movies, on TV and even in the pages of this newspaper, death row is not some romantic la-la land where bad men turned good always learn to confront their horrible pasts. It's also not Hannibal Lecter Land either, with inmates who read Foucault over fava beans and a nice chianti. Too often death penalty abolitionists who use art as their medium-be it in movies and TV or through writing-romanticize the death row experience or portray death row as an exotic, mysterious place. With few notable exceptions (Dead Man Walking comes to mind), inmates are usually portrayed as men wronged by the system, remorseful for their crimes. In movies, they are usually either not totally guilty (The Chamber), or totally not guilty (Dancer in the Dark, The Green Mile). Rarely does anyone defend the really crazy, mean-spirited guys (and they exist too!) who show no remorse for their crimes and seek to cause as much trouble as possible before being killed.
But if we ever truly hope to get rid of the death penalty, we're going to have to start defending those men, too. We're going to have to stop perpetuating the myth that death row is filled exclusively with innocents and "bad" guys who have turned around. We're going to have to show that the system is so corrupt, so inhumane, that no one deserves to die at the hands of the state.
I don't think we're there yet. A few years ago, when Karla Faye Tucker claimed she had found God in prison, the big question everyone (journalists, writers, etc.) asked was, "Is it right to kill this person in the first place?" But when an angry monster like Tim McVeigh nears execution, the question changes from, "Is it right to execute?" to, "Is it right to show the execution live on TV?"
That is why I find it so infuriating when I see artists and writers turning inmates into heroes. There is much to be learned from these men, no doubt. Their stories are important. Killing them-even the really psychotic ones-is wrong and stupid. But it's a serious mistake to romanticize the death row "experience." You don't end up at the top of Central Prison for accidentally running over the neighborhood golden retriever. You get there (and, by the way, if you are poor and black and have a court-appointed lawyer you get there a helluva lot faster) by shooting someone, by stabbing someone, by lighting someone on fire.
By romanticizing the experience and the inmates, sincere supporters of reform only add fuel to conservatives' fire. In trying to portray the inmates as "victims," abolitionists often reinforce the misconception that all death penalty opponents are soft on crime and pro-criminal.
The bottom line is that while there are some inmates who have changed and who want to share their stories and help others, there are also some pretty manipulative, bad guys out there.
If we ever truly want to change the system, we're going to have to start writing about why they, too, should not be killed. There is nothing wrong with trying to "humanize" inmates; they are humans, after all. But in idealizing prisoners, in romanticizing the prison experience, activists are only hurting the men they are trying so hard to help.
Lucas Schaefer is a Trinity freshman and associate editorial page editor of The Chronicle.
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