By Wilbert Rideau
LONDON, Jan 16 2011 (IPS)

When I was about fourteen, my mother took me to the black funeral home in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to see the body of Robert Lee Sauls, who had been executed in the electric chair for killing a white man who came upon him as he was sleeping in a car parked off the road in the man’s field. I don’t remember what, if anything, my mother said about the affair, whether she took me with her as a life lesson, or whether I was simply taken along as she paid her respects and prayed for the man’s soul.

But I knew Sauls had been executed for his crime. That knowledge was the furthest thing from my teenage mind in 1961 when I missed my bus home one evening and, desperate to change my dead-ended life, made a rash decision to hold up the bank in the shopping center where I worked as a janitor. The robbery was botched before it really began, and as events spun out of control in its aftermath, in a panic I killed teller Julia Ferguson. It never entered my mind when I walked into the bank that I would hurt anyone, much less that I would take a life.

I spent twelve years condemned to die by all-white male juries in three successive trials before the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision briefly abolished the death penalty. I was resentenced to life imprisonment in 1973. I won a new trial in 2000 and on January 15, 2005, was convicted of manslaughter, which carried a maximum sentence of twenty-one years. Since I had already served forty-four years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, I was freed on the spot. Louisiana is very tough on criminals.

Not only are they executed, but Louisiana locks up more of them per capita than any other state in the U.S., and makes them serve the longest prison terms in the world. If severe punishment mattered, Louisiana would be the safest state in the U.S.; instead, it consistently ranks as the most murderous. Nonetheless, politicians love the death penalty because it allows them to address the issue of crime and violence with quick and easy rhetoric, leading a fearful and gullible public to falsely believe that executing someone will “send a message” to criminals that their acts will not be tolerated, and that the criminals will then stop committing crimes. This makes the public feel good, but it does not deter crime. Deterrence is the end result of a reasoning process. If we are thinking rationally, we avoid behaviors or situations that will cause us pain and suffering.

The problem is that most violent crimes are not committed by rational-thinking people. They are committed by people who are walking time bombs because of frustration, rage, despair, desperation, and an inability to solve their life problems. Even people who are normally rational can lose control of fierce emotions and kill: there is the jealous man who kills his spouse, the disgruntled employee who returns to the workplace to kill his boss or his colleagues, the battered wife who just canÂ’t take it anymore and kills her sleeping husband, or the fearful hold-up artist who reacts with deadly force to his victim unexpectedly reaching for a weapon to defend himself. Understanding that most violence is driven by emotion does not in any way excuse it or absolve the culprit of responsibility, but it does explain why the death penalty does not deter it.

The best example I know of that points up the ineffectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is the case of C. Murray Henderson, who, highly educated, was the warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary before he left to become Commissioner of Corrections for Tennessee, where his job was to oversee the state’s entire prison system. If anyone could have been deterred by the prospect of the death penalty, it should have been the 78-year-old Henderson, who spent all of his professional life in the business of punishing criminals and who had intimate knowledge of life in prison and on death row. Yet his emotions overpowered his rational mind one morning in 1997, and he shot his wife Anne five times as she sat in the back parlor of their plantation home in St. Francisville, Louisiana. She survived. Henderson went to prison, where he died several years later. Deterrence is a myth with universal appeal, but nowhere is the fallacy of it better illustrated than in the kill-or-be-killed world of gangs and drug-trafficking, where violence and the death penalty are extra-judiciously imposed for transgressions. The executioner is not a prison medical technician who slips the lethal needle in the offender’s arm but a drive-by shooter or hit-man. Yet, the prospect of getting slaughtered does nothing to deter those aspiring gangsters waiting to step into the shoes of the fallen. Of all the murderers I met during my forty-four years in prison, not one had thought about the death penalty before or while committing the crime that sent him to prison or to death row. Such forethought takes place in the minds of coolly reflective individuals, for whom the notion of punishing one person to scare others makes perfect sense. But it doesnÂ’t apply to most violent behavior, which is committed by individuals caught in a maelstrom of emotions, insensible to the consequences of their actions.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS) (*)

Wilbert Rideau is author of In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, a memoir. While in prison, he became a journalist and won some of AmericaÂ’s most prestigious journalism awards, including a George Polk Award and the American Bar AssociationÂ’s Silver Gavel.

Excerpt:

By Wilbert Rideau
LONDON, Jan 16 2011 (IPS)

Nothing in your previous life prepares you for living on death row. YouÂ’re like a head of cabbage on a garden row: planted, forced to lead a static existence, every day exactly like the last and the next. Unlike the cabbage, though, your life is without purpose. You are a cipher merely holding a place, awaiting your turn in the execution chamber. Until that day comes, perpetual misery is your condition in life, and your reward for surviving today is that you get to suffer tomorrow as well.

On April 11, 1962, I was cuffed, chained, and transported to LouisianaÂ’s death row. There were 12 other men living in the 15 available cells. Roaches scattered as I entered Cell 9. It was about the size of the bathroom in a typical middle-class American home: six feet wide by eight feet deep (about 1.8 meters by 2.4 meters).

Restlessness went with living in such a small space. There was room enough only for push-ups, sit-ups, and squats, insufficient to exercise all the body’s muscles. We were allowed out of our cells and into the hallway ­one at a time­ for only 15 minutes twice a week for a shower. We spent years like this, always indoors, with no sunshine.

Worse than the physical toll exacted on our bodies was the toll on our minds. Death row was bedlam ­an unending chorus of flushing toilets, curses shouted across the tier by feuding inmates, petty arguments over virtually anything, and competing radios trying to out-blare one another. Most of the pandemonium on death row was a result of men being driven by maddening monotony, boredom, severe emotional deprivation, and the lack of normalcy as a frame of reference for their lives.

We were like human animals in one of the old-style zoos, before society realized it was inhumane to confine a large beast in a cramped cage. And like the tiger that obsessively bobs from one side to the other of his barred cage, we would pace back and forth over the small patch of floor beside our bunks. Four steps, turn; four steps, turn; four steps, turn, for hours on end, stopping at the bars of the cell to stare out at nothing. On occasion a man might bang his head against the steel bars ­a ruse: drawing enough blood could be an avenue out to the hospital for the criminally insane, where conditions were better and the insanity label protected him from execution.

We were a motley lot with little in common save that each had committed a crime. We were lumped together against our will, and life devoid of the normal pleasantries that prop us up in the outside world was disorienting. Most people seldom think about the trivial social interactions that fill our everyday lives ­ from the clerk in the grocery who wishes us a good day, to our fellow passenger on the bus who nods a morning greeting, to the co-workers or cleaning crew with whom we routinely exchange small talk. But these “meaningless” social relations are part of the glue that holds us together, that lets us know we have a place in the world. Cut off from them, and often abandoned by friends and family, men can become unmoored.

That is what happens on death row. You lose the sense of yourself as part of a larger whole, a context in which your being has meaning and makes sense. You begin a struggle to keep your sanity. You must be on guard against magical thinking, the temptation to indulge in non-rational cause and effect, like thinking that the prison served red beans twice this week because you willed it, or that a judge will reverse your conviction if your horoscope continues to show the stars in a favorable alignment. On death row, where there is no meaning, your mind tries to create meaning out of nothing, and this can lead you to confuse fantasy with reality. Besides fighting to stay sane, every day you must justify your existence to yourself, justify why you continue to live when youÂ’re merely waiting to die, when the whole world wants you dead.

Books were what saved me. I turned to them just to kill time and to give my mind something to fasten onto, so I wouldnÂ’t go crazy. It turned out that reading connected me back to the world in a more positive way than I had ever been connected before. Gradually, I grew and matured and shed the ignorance that had driven me to death row. I wasnÂ’t unique: most of the guys on death row took up reading or studying or corresponded with good Samaritans and became better than the worst thing they had ever done.

I realize every day just how fortunate I am to have survived death row. Stanley “Tookie” Williams wasn’t so lucky: the co-founder of America’s premier street gang, The Crips, reformed himself in prison and wrote books to deter youngsters from following in his footsteps. No matter: California executed him in 2005 after he’d spent 25 years on death row. To the state, Tookie was less than a head of cabbage on a garden row. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Wilbert Rideau is author of In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance, a memoir. While in prison, he became a journalist and won some of AmericaÂ’s most prestigious journalism awards, including a George Polk Award and the American Bar AssociationÂ’s Silver Gavel.

Excerpt: