Moreover, American social norms in the main forbid the public from seeing real death in traditional media. We fear the State less because we are forbidden from seeing the State carrying out its most fearsome task, the ending of human life. So few people, in America, can witness executions, save for State officials, representative members of the families of victims and offenders, and a few journalists, that for most Americans, capital punishment is at most an abstract idea. Note, too, that use of the death penalty in America today is not a rhetorical performance meant to keep a regime in power. The punishment is thought also to provide explicit justice to the families of the felons’ victims. Death penalty supporters tend to believe the implied threat of this punishment deters capital-level crimes. Though application of the death penalty is increasingly rare in America, its continuation is based on reaching didactic and cathartic ends. So instilled has this adjusted penal norm become in the Western world that summary, or immediate, execution by representatives of the State may now be prosecuted as murder, and during war, as a war crime.Ĭapital punishment is legal in 31 of America’s 50 states. In Europe and The United States, and with the exceptions of capital offenses and the treatment of American slaves, the threat of long social isolation through imprisonment replaced the immediate threat of bodily destruction. In other words, “punishment of an immediately less physical kind, a certain discretion in the inflicting of pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display” became the new accepted norm (p. The State chose then to express its power more implicitly, moving punishment out of the town square and into prisons closed to the public. A riled public cowed no longer by the State’s instrument, in this case the guillotine, known colloquially as the ‘National Razor,’ now made the object of public execution the executioner. Put simply, many of the Revolution’s leaders fell prey to the same physical terror they had inspired the Reign of Terror concluded with Revolution leader Robespierre’s own beheading. The end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (1793 – 1794) substantiated the general change in European punitive norms that Foucault describes. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared” (Foucault, 1977, p. Nevertheless, the “fact remains that a few decades, saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on the face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. It is well known many such public gatherings had a festive, carnival atmosphere however, if the condemned was a popular or sympathetic person, or if the executioner handled his work unskillfully, the State could be perceived by the masses as unjust or inept, and questioning of the State might begin (Moore, 2017). The executioner was made an outcast and held in esteem for the same reason: He maintained an inflexible social order. In this way, an executioner, the physical embodiment of the State, was reviled socially, but held in awe publicly. The more severe the crime, the more blood was let the State reestablishing power visually in relation to the levels of transgressions committed by the condemned. Public torture and execution were explicit, theatrical displays of institutional power, demonstrating to the onlookers that they, like the condemned people standing before them, lacked primary ownership of their outward person (the flesh) and inward person (the blood). In Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, Foucault (1977) suggests the public torture and execution of criminals by the State were vulgar, and sometimes provocative, rhetorical performances.