by Dorian Larson

The Texas state death house in Huntsville is a squat brick building fronted by a few square yards of struggling grass and knee-­high shrubs. Gleaming chain link fencing surrounds a concrete ramp that rises to the door to accommodate shackled ankles. Most death row dwellers are housed an hour to the east. The onsite cells are numbered one to nine. Their inhabitants move down after number one exits for the last time; then another is shipped into cell nine.

Everywhere in the Walls Unit and Huntsville’s four other prisons, the visual field is willfully dull: the faded grays and browns, brick and concrete that span prisons from Maine to Hawaii corral bodies into corridors and cells. Color is so successfully banished, writers inside report breaking into tears at the sight of a guard’s red handkerchief. As a man incarcerated in Ohio writes, prison is “an oatmeal world (…) Our lives, our activities, our thoughts, and our words, food, clothes, even the buildings and pavements themselves reflect this antiseptic eradication of pigment and hue. (…) concrete and cinder blocks and bars meant to induce a prolonged mental coma.” The Walls Unit’s exceptions are the brass bars at entry and (for most) at departure. And the killing chamber itself. Its block walls sport a greenish turquoise. In any hipster hotel, it would be chic.

I’m crowded into this tight space with a clutch of academics. We are in Huntsville for the 2023 convening of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism at Sam Houston State University. This year’s theme, Romanticism and Justice. Organizers arranged the prison tour for anyone willing. The official conference start is in three hours.

My peers and I breathe the aroma of nothing around a cruciform mattress that rises to waist level on a welded cruciform frame. To its right hand, one-­way glass looms up to conceal where state officials will sit to observe; on the left, paired windows span the length of the room. These front the two viewing chambers, divided by another block wall: one side for family of the murder victim; one for those of the body strapped to canvas and steel. These parties never cross paths, never lay eyes on one another. Their power to speak, to hold accountable, to sorrow and to heal—things that many victims’ rights groups would prefer to killing—are sundered by cement block. Seated in fixed rows, mothers and fathers, siblings and cousins and grandparents are referred to only as witnesses. Reduced to their capacity to see, they are severed by walls and glass from the stories that connect them to the body buckled to a cross, and thus to each other. Their legally mandated role is to verify that the state has carried out someone’s idea of justice.

The Supreme Court has declared lethal injection acceptably humane, yet straps and buckles cross arms and legs and torso—built for a struggle against the most commonly botched method of state-­sponsored killing. The problem is unqualified staff (by oath, no doctor or nurse can participate). Unable to locate viable veins, this search can drag on for hours. In Alabama, failed executions led to adding more straps and extending the window for the procedure to thirty hours. One man, jabbed and bleeding like a living voodoo doll, turned to his witnesses: “Can you believe this?”

In advance of papers on “Trans Spectrality in Maturin’s Melmoth,” and “Climate Instability and Climate Justice in Words­worth,” I’ve been invited to give a talk on the history of writing by incarcerated Americans, including writers in cells today. From Patrick Lyon’s 1799 description of men attacked by rats and women raped at guards’ pleasure inside the first penitentiary experiment on Philadelphia’s Walnut Street, to Austin Reed’s 1859 expose of violently imposed industrial slavery in New York; Jack London reporting strong-­arm survival tactics after a thirty-­second trial for vagrancy in 1904, and Alexander Berkman’s (1912), Kate Richard O’Hare’s (1920), and an anonymous female convict’s 1934 reiteration of the deep overlap between poverty and criminalization … on to the inflection point of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), where the prison is anatomized as a vital organ of white supremacy—a message echoed by the Black intellectuals held at Joliet and Soledad, Attica and San Quentin in the 60s and 70s and detailed today by writers from Florida to Alaska.

My paper’s central thesis is straightforward: the consensus of writers who have documented over two and a quarter-­centuries of incarceration in the United States is that prisons simply don’t work. They never have. From their beginning, they’ve been this nation’s master class in three-­card monte. Rather than deterring crime, prisons degrade prospects for employment, marriage, and community connections, making resisting crime harder despite reformed intentions. This has been the case since Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail opened in 1790. Time inside doesn’t rehabilitate. Reform occurs only due to the efforts of imprisoned people to resist the damage done to them. Prisons simply mete out generic pain for crimes from drug possession to murder, inspiring less remorse for lawbreaking than disdain for the law.

Our guide through Huntsville was a bandy-­legged white man who is the prison’s assistant warden. As we crowded into the killing chamber, he crossed his arms as he leaned a vested shoulder against the threshold and explained: the names on the execution team are never made public. With something like a wink, he insinuates that one of those names may be his.

My talk at the conference was prefaced by an often-­quoted passage from legal scholar Robert Cover:

“Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: A judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children, even his life (…) Neither legal interpretation nor the violence it occasions may be properly understood apart from one another.”

Cover echoes Walter Benjamin, who wrote in 1921: “in the exercise of violence over life and death, more than in any other legal act, the law affirms itself.” The law bears authority because it can hurt you. A monopoly on legitimate violence is what makes law law.

I’ve been teaching writing workshops and organizing college programs in prisons since 2006. Between that work and reading thousands of essays by incarcerated people from across the nation, I know that without testimony to the human costs of law’s violence, we can never measure the true costs of the current legal order. Incarcerated people know first-­hand what Cover also claims, which is that “the interpretive commitments of [legal] officials are realized…in the flesh.”

I suspect our guide would agree but question the relevance. You do bad, you get punished. I picture him repeating this mantra as he plunges a needle into arms, groin, hands, throat, feet, under collar bones, and all the other places such hunts have taken untrained hands. If he was in this business a decade ago, I can picture him clapping away any lingering doubts as then Texas governor Rick Perry replied to a Republican presidential primary debate moderator: asked what he had to say about the record 234 people executed under his watch, Perry replied without hesitation, “Americans understand justice.” Perry had also lost no sleep—“No sir”—over the possibility that he’d signed off on the murder of innocents, placing full trust in the Texas judiciary. Like audiences to town-­square executions before and after this nation was founded, many in the California audience cheered, announcing their values in a celebration of death in a world lethally coded White v. Black.

The modern insistence that justice can be measured in years of suffering and death is peculiar to authoritarian regimes, theocracies, dictatorships, colonial powers, and the United States. It’s an Old Testament belief that has only periodically faced contest in a stridently New Testament nation, least of all by those who can safely assume that legal violence will land on others. This reach into an imaginary past is particularly ironic among supporters who evoke the nation’s founding values. Rehabilitative confinement, theorized by Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin between signing the Declaration of Independence and the start ofthe first penitentiary experiment on Walnut Street, was deemed virtually obligatory in a nation whose Constitution and half of its original Amendments guarantee the rights of criminal suspects, trial by jury, and bar cruel and unusual punishments. (Little wonder, since a quarter of all British immigrants at the time were transported felons).

On March 9, 1787, Rush argued to Franklin’s salon that once hidden, legalized punishment would metastasize in public imagination. His descriptions mirror the rage for Gothic tales of his day: winding roads up mountain passes to prison gates whose creaking would echo from the surrounding cliffs. The highest profile critic of capital punishment of his day, Rush theorized that would-­be criminals would be better deterred by fantasies of what might be done to the condemned than by scenes bound to draw sympathy to outlaws or harden the audience to violence. What emerged was a prison with two bodies: one in public imagination, one behind walls, and the public habit of accepting officials’ reports and censoring incarcerated writers.

For the past two decades, my professional career has been committed to creating platforms for the writing of incarcerated people. In 2013, seventy-­one essays from twenty-­seven states appeared in Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America. The title—suggested by a man who served four decades in California prisons—demonstrated that the prison and jail population is not only larger than all but the three largest American cities but scattered among an archipelago of over 5,000 lockups, confined writers articulate an experience more coherent than we might expect from a survey of residents of New York, L.A., or Chicago: regular degradation, abuse, and debilitation, woven through with miraculous feats of resilience, insight, innovation, and active resistance. That book’s deadline passed in 2012, but essays kept coming, leading to the creation of The American Prison Writing Archive (prisonwitness.org), a digital archive of over 3,800 essays by over 1,100 incarcerated authors. Both the need for and the challenge of this work stem from the same root: white American voters without family in cages have never much cared what happens to imprisoned people as long as, alive or dead, they stay inside.

Inside the Texas death chamber, my colleagues’ eyes dart about over straps and glass and a microphone fixed on a boom to catch final words. Progressives all, we search the concrete scene of what the current president celebrates and over half of all Americans support: a human being lying strapped down and chemically paralyzed (to spare witnesses’ sensitivities) as their lungs fill with their own bodily fluids. After years of decline in the numbers, we’re seeing an uptick driven not by more gruesome crimes but the usual reason: “governors and prosecutors seeking to burnish their crime-­fighting bona fides.”

That execution does not deter murder has been argued as far back as the seventeenth century, and that debate continues. Whatever its practical efficacy, state-­sanctioned killing bears profound cultural and political resonance, as former Governor Perry made evident. Execution not only demonstrates the law’s ultimate power over life and death. Today’s pseudo-­medical apparatus, the ritual, poignant final meals and words and years of litigation—like bright walls and polished glass—sterilize retribution of the taint of raw vengeance, which is a behavior Plato compared to the madness of whipping a rock. An exercise in collective bad faith, antiseptic execution has the dual effects of dipping collective hands into blood and washing those of the state. This scentless room announces, Murder is one thing; state-­sponsored punishment quite another. Yet “in this very violence,” Walter Benjamin adds, “something rotten in the law is revealed.”

Inside prison walls across the nation—where cellphones are contraband, accountability absent, and judicial review the infrequent exception—what’s rotten grows rank. State power to under-­screen, under-­train, and over-­arm immunized actors is the proscenium to a man handcuffed, his ankles shackled, pushed from the top of a flight of concrete stairs. It is a man slammed into a wall with the force to shatter an eye socket. It is a mentally ill man locked into a 160-­degree shower until the skin peels from his corpse. It’s the sexual favors and routinized rape of caged women, demanded as the price of legally mandated food and medical care. The public may occasionally feel the prick of scandal or conscience in the infrequent instances when such incidents reach the media, but these rare occasions rise up to awareness from a sea of complacency with death by incarceration.

For much of the prison’s history, clemency limited the penal landscape. Clemency is now rare and death by incarceration common. Over 200,000 people serve life or virtual life (50 year+) sentences in this country—more than the entire prison population in 1970. An additional 50,000—two thirds of them Black and most commonly sentenced when under the age of twenty-­five—have no parole date, thus mandated to die inside. After living for decades condemned to death by incarceration, Ken Hartman observes of Life without Parole sentences, “The civil rights community trumpets it as a progressive development, while the ‘tough on crime’ crowd uses it as a compassionate cover.”

In the nineteenth century, it was argued by many that life sentences have a deterrent effect because a living death is more terrible to contemplate than death itself. Today, death by incarceration is touted as an act of mercy. And what cannot be done to bodies caged with the walking dead?

Four hours later, with the conference underway, I’m standing at a podium before a few dozen academics, tracing the history of American prison witness. Yet that turquoise room still dampens the back of my neck in a way even Texas air conditioning can’t touch. I conclude my remarks and for the next two days, the conference—with the usual earnest discussion and equally earnest drinking—continues to unfold.

Replacing public death, maiming and dismemberment with a quarantine of time was a civilizing idea. But all institutions seek self-­preservation, let alone one built for secrecy. Reports from 1799 describing spaces of violence and abuse by state employees are echoed in 2025 because it has flattered us to believe U.S. law points elsewhere. One place the law has pointed repeatedly is the death chamber.

Since 1848, when it was established as the state’s first prison, men inside the Walls Unit at Huntsville have been fed repellent food, baked to death in Texas summers, and subjected to beatings and degradation. Yet as our guide explained, years of legal challenges to execution have rendered acts as simple as resecuring a killing-­chamber curtain rod subject to judicial review. As long as public conscience is soothed regarding how convicted people are killed, it doesn’t matter how they live.

What matters in Texas and in every other state are race and history. Since the colonial period, those slated for death have been primarily young and Black. Today, Black people and whites count evenly among homicide victims, yet 75% of executions are for the killing of white people. Black executees are three times their percentage of the general population, and four times that percentage are sentenced to die between prison walls. Of the 1,567 executions carried out in the United States since 1976—after a Supreme Court moratorium required states to find less arbitrary methods of deciding whom to kill (that is, methods that obscure blatant racism)—82% have occurred in former slave states. Prison slavery itself—protected by the 13th Amendment—remains practice in those states, while other states and the federal government pay nickels per hour for the labor that makes mass scale incarceration possible.

The Black Lives Matter movement brought long needed attention to executions carried out without benefit of arrest, charging, or jury. Few practices demonstrate how much less Black lives are made to matter than fully adjudicated death. Over thirty years ago, Mumia Abu-­Jamal named this fact in a Yale Law Journal article written from Pennsylvania’s death row. A Supreme Court decision admitted the death penalty’s application is racist, yet claimed that the court could not reverse the death sentence of a Black man named Warren McCleskey. As Abu-­Jamal wrote:

Justice Powell noted with alarm, “McCleskey’s claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.”

        What does happen, in this America, is the cheapening of Black life and the placing of a premium upon white life. As Justice Brennan’s eloquent dissent in McCleskey argues, the fact that this practice may be customary does not make it constitutional. To do justice, one must consistently battle, in Brennan’s words, “a fear of too much justice.”

Where the highest court fears too much justice, the result is bound to be too little. But if the prison is such an abject failure, why does it and its debilitating practices persist?

It’s not because prisons prevent crime. Studies and task forces reaching back nearly a century have found prisons criminogenic. Yet legal caging continues, the numbers rising and sinking with the political rhetoric and moral panics of the moment.

From a prison in California, Bobby Wheeler names one psychic root of the prison’s longevity:

You need us (criminals) to identify yourselves with, to secretly envy, and to stoutly punish. Yes! We represent your alter egos—your “bad” selves—rejected and projected. We do for you the forbidden, illegal things you wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, we bear the burdens of your displaced guilt and punishment (…) Crime in the news is often a kind of sermon; it is a warning, a reminder of the existence of evil and the necessity for good to conquer (…) Hence the wretched handling of me and my brethren, from beginning to end, is part of a daily morality play—a publicly supported, moralistic ritual enactment, without benefit of clergy.

Wheeler suggests that our so-­called modern criminal legal system is less modern than we’d like to believe. The continuing authority of states to kill flags an archaic desire for human sacrifice, a ritual conducted before a sanctified fire intended to cast our shadows into the upright silhouettes we want to believe distinguish us from (non-­white) monsters. Criminal law’s monopoly on lethal authority requires what critic Rene Girard called sacred violence, and fellow Frenchman Michel Foucault named over forty years before Bobby Wheeler: “Prison is the only place where power is manifest in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force (…) Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil.” Perry, President Trump, current Texas Governor Greg Abbot (Republican), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Republican) et al trade in this serenity: White America’s sense of justice is no abstraction. It can be measured in the weight of dead Black bodies.

Would prisons become more humane if all forms of capital punishment, including death-­by-­incarceration sentences were abolished? The results are in on that question. Capital punishment today is in retreat. Twenty-­three states have abolished it; three more have it on the books but are under gubernatorial moratoria. Several of those without temporary bans have executed no one for over a decade. And even states where execution is relatively common, it is most common in a handful of counties. Yet U.S. jails and prisons remain sites of continuing abuse. And any felony sentence, as Michelle Alexander’s best-­selling analysis has made clear, is an effective life sentenced to second-­class citizenship.

Nations that have ended state murder are nations that have also embraced Rush’s original vision, acknowledging the human dignity even of law breakers, abandoning the belief that justice can be portioned out in pain and suffering. Over the hundreds of years that we have insisted on the accuracy of that measure, convenient cover has been offered for an unbroken history of penal apartheid, stamped and sealed by police, prosecutors, prisons, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the conference ends, en route to the airport seventy miles to the southeast, I make a brief pilgrimage to the Rothko Chapel in downtown Houston. It’s a warm April Fool’s Day. In the park adjacent to the chapel, the sounds of a festival for kids—calliope, a bouncy house emanating screeches of laughter—wafts on the humidity through a thin hedge.

Inside Rothko’s octagonal bunker, the hush of both museum and church rises with the heat toward segmented glass. The air on the floor is nearly chilling. Each wall features one canvas or a triptych of the fourteen canvasses the painter composed for this space: all black, a few edged in a purple that emerges only after a second’s gazing. Worn wooden bench seats fan from the center. I sit and face one wall of canvases, then move to the next—paintings that invoke something like awe at the wonder of blankness. The peace here is infectious. A Chapel brochure calls this “a sacred space, a forum for world leaders, a place for solitude and gathering. It is an epicenter for civil rights, a quiet disruption, a stillness that moves.”

Houston is a blue city floating on oil profits. The first major city to elect an openly queer mayor, while hosting one of the nation’s most terrifying lockups, the Harris County Jail. And this chapel—as light pours down on soothing darkness—is just an hour from the gravitational center of law’s carnage.

If Americans were haunted by what we do to condemned people, Huntsville would be the Auschwitz of state murder: Its mere mention would sober conversation or embitter debate. In truth, there is no such haunting for Americans other than the usual suspects: the inhabitants of the nation’s 5,000+ lockups and of neighborhoods where police operate as the prison’s agents in the field. And so Huntsville remains yet another American town where the prison and university (tax-­funded job makers for different generations) employ nearly everyone other than those providing food and car repair, retail labor, municipal services and funerals for prison and university workers.

The myth that prisons make the public safer—or anyone better—is more deeply seated and as evidence free as the belief that state killing reduces murder. As deep as the idea that execution or prisons can be fixed by anything short of changes so profound as to constitute abolition. For over two centuries, prison reform—the regular tinkering with policies and practices, including those of legalized death—has been the carrot dangling in front of this inexhaustible mule to keep it moving in ever widening circles. Reform dug the mass grave for human futures and hope that U.S. prison reformers push as a humane alternative, practiced now at industrial scale. Perhaps this is what the boutique turquoise walls in the death chamber insist: Court approved and medicalized, this is no industry, no machinery for piling up corpses under political platforms.

For most of our history, we had the excuse that, however far short they fell from their founding ideals, American prisons had nowhere to look for anything better. That is simply not true today. Many European nations have managed to create and run prisons stripped of punishment beyond a limited quarantine of time; prisons that are forward looking, where staff work with convicted people to prepare for the day of release. That these nations do not execute is part of the same collective agreement that grounds all other practice. Two centuries ago, these nations sent envoys to study a radical American experiment in responding to crime. Today, that tide is trickling in reverse. U.S. prison administrators and others are going abroad to study how to practice what was indeed a truly great American idea.

Bradon, my Lyft driver from Huntsville to the Chapel and, later, to the airport, is a born Huntsvillean with family and health problems. As we drove toward the city, he voiced a longing for the return of Donald Trump(“when everybody had money”), softened by sympathy for people like himself working to make ends meet. He drives well and laughs easily. He parked himself somewhere while I was in the Chapel. When I text him that I’m out, he swoops back to the curb where we parted. I had left my bag and laptop in his car because he seemed an honest sort, like most Americans if you give them half a chance. We agreed to handle the cost of the ride from chapel to airport off the books, like good libertarians.

At the airport curb, when I offer him three twenties, he rears back in his seat, hands up: “Whoa! I don’t want to be that guy.” He takes forty.

It would have been easy enough to broach the subject of capital punishment. But it was a long ride, and even two days later I’m still feeling more sobered by time in the killing chamber than I like (and I don’t drink). From waiting with Attica prison guards while men make their way to my classroom, I know anyone can surprise you. A straight Fox or One America News party line can veer around LGBTQA+ or disability rights, even execution. The heresy usually stems from personal experience: a queer sister, a locked-­up cousin, or, in Bradon’s case, navigating his mother’s wheelchair around a town with more hills than ramps. I confess, I liked Bradon and didn’t want to imagine him sitting beside a man in a vest cheering on their former governor. I didn’t want him to fail to surprise me. As he drives away, his lefthand tick-­tocking a V left and right, I wish I had given him more credit.

I want to give all Americans more credit.

The best I can manage is to acknowledge that those who have never felt the real or near nip of police and prison guards can’t be haunted by a ghost they’ve never seen or heard knocking in the night. Of the many high hopes Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin held up for the prison, it has been a success only in one: erecting stone, wire and concrete between its two bodies, between witnesses viewing from two sides of tax-­built walls.

The airport is not overly loud or distinct, though more colorful than the Chapel or Walls Unit: Americans in pajama-­like plane wear, with a scattering of cowboy boots and hats. All decent people, no doubt, whatever beliefs their president and governor may hold.

As I and my fellow passengers shuffle down the jet bridge, I imagine Dr. Rush quipping to Franklin as he started down the steps after the salon: With an idea as revolutionary as this, what could go wrong? It was a peculiar idea then, for a peculiar institution. Today, accounting for scale and all of its modes of death, it is simply more lethal.

As we lift off, departing for Syracuse, Houston shrinks from highways and high rises into unregulated sprawl, then a gray patch on a greenish landscape. Consumed below are Bradon and all his ailing kin, Chapel staff now home and taking a load off, and hundreds of condemned people, no doubt bartering for food and tobacco after yet another inadequate meal. Ahead of me, inside Attica, a half dozen men are sitting in cages, reviewing an assigned essay by Elizabeth Hardwick and their own hand-­written pages.

It’s a fact rarely acknowledged even among prison educators: people charged with homicide generally make the best students. The lengths of their sentences demand seriousness about creating sustainable lives inside. Living with themselves beyond their crimes requires a depth of self-­reflection and self-­assessment that’s rare even inside recovery circles. And in a place where any hint of weakness can get you killed, their willingness to expose vulnerability—even the intellectual vulnerability that classrooms unearth—makes it difficult not to return their trust. The men I have worked with inside Attica have seen me through a rough divorce and other difficult patches. All of them might carry a death date had New York not ended capital punishment. I don’t think they’ve ever fully understood what an aid they’ve been to me simply by surviving in circumstances that make any challenges I face seem Lilliputian.

What they have taught me is that any human being, if they accept the weight for taking a life, must break down every notion they ever had about themselves, then search through the salvage for whatever they can find to begin to rebuild. Their survival in prison requires acute skills in reading others for signs of threat—in institutions that house the bulk of the nation’s mentally ill—or opportunities for deal making or friendship. And they do this work while witnessing, year upon year upon decade, what happens when state power can do as it will to bodies behind walls.

These men credit me with teaching them how to write. I credit them with teaching me the country I live in, and what it means to live not only protected by the law but from it. By writing clearly about what they have learned and what they have witnessed, these men are contributing to a body of literature that reveals as much about what we are as a nation at this moment as the testimony of enslaved people made plain about an earlier era. As philosopher Lisa Guenther writes after years of reading with men on Tennessee’s death row, “We could learn a lot from these people if we weren’t so determined to kill them.”

Having passed through the fifteen automated and manual gates and steel doors to reach Attica’s mostly dark academic classrooms, I chat with tonight’s desk officer, advise him on how his kid can apply for student aid, then enter the oatmeal-­colored room assigned for the night. I arrange wobbly desk-­chairs in a circle, then sit and wait. Men’s voices enter the hall. I stand and approach the door, ready to break regulations once again by shaking their hands. Aiden is first, a man with a quick wink and a sly sense of humor. He asks, “How you doing, professor. Not working you too hard?”

 “Nah. I’m ok,” I tell him.

And as men arrive, joking, happy to see each other, for the next three hours, it’s true.  

This article was originally published by the Transformative Justice Journal (Vol. 6, Issue 1, July 2025). It is reprinted here with permission.

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