Evi Girling

‘Looking Death in the Face’ The Benetton Death Penalty Campaign

This article focuses on the controversial ‘We on death row’ campaign launched by Benetton in January 2000. The campaign featured photographic images of prisoners from death rows in the USA. The campaign, which has been dismissed by Austin Sarat as an old and failing abolitionist strategy, poses a number of challenges for our understanding and assessments of the potential ‘reformist’ efficacy of representations of punishment. The article sets out to explore the ways of seeing and strategies of knowing the death penalty in the USA and the contingent and unpredictable consequences of local ways of seeing and strategies of knowing of these global spectacles of punishment. It argues that despite the effectiveness of the cultural policing of representations of the death penalty in the USA the Benetton campaign allowed a ‘witnessing’, a seeing through the pretences behind the sanctioning of the death penalty at a moment which may prove resistant to the normalization of disturbing images of punishment - the liminal state of death row.

Landscapes of Protection: the Past, Present and Futures of Policing in an English Town

In his latest reflections on our times Zygmunt Bauman (1997) depicts modernity as an epoch in which a good deal of freedom was sacrificed in the name of collectively guaranteed order and security; an era of reliability where people were able (albeit, for many, within severely circumscribed limits) to forge secure identities, plan ahead and hope for the better. According to Bauman, these days have gone. In the post- (or late-) modern age people live under conditions of over-whelming and self-perpetuating uncertainty, such that: No jobs are guaranteed, no positions are foolproof, no skills are of lasting utility, experience and know-how turn into liability as soon as they become assets, seductive careers all too often prove to be suicide tracks … Livelihood, social position, acknowledgement of usefulness and entitlement to self-dignity may all vanish together, overnight and without notice. (ibid. 23)

Lessons from History

This paper draws on a study of the ways in which the moral and practical dilemmas of punishment are debated and deliberated upon in discussions among nine year old children (with adult facilitators). Theoretically, we are concerned with the points of connection between the social study of childhood and the analysis of punishment as an arena of discourse and practice; and methodologically we address this topic from the perspective of conversation. Here we focus on one aspect of the childrens talk, namely the mobilisation of themes and images that seem to have their origin in the more or less remote past. We argue that a contextual and nuanced exploration of the historicity of such ‘punishment talk’ can help in disclosing how punishment ‘works’ as a theme in politics and culture—history offers a resource of precedents and examples that children find good to think with. We suggest a particular association between this historical imagination (and the often physically forceful measures that it invokes) and times of crisis or emergency. This is apparent, for example, when discussion turns to the persistence of the death penalty in the United States. We conclude with some brief remarks on the significance of involving children in such deliberations for the development of alternative (or ‘replacement’) penal politics. Copyright