US executions shifted from public spectacle to hidden state violence: a legacy of racial control and carceral expansion
Original framing: “Public executions in the US were once a community spectacle and then they stopped - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The transition from public to private executions in the US mirrors the 19th-century shift from lynching to legal hangings, both serving as tools of white supremacy. The 1830s saw the rise of 'respectable' executions as a way to distance the state from the racialized mob violence of lynching, yet the targets remained disproportionately Black and Indigenous. The 1972 *Furman v. Georgia* Supreme Court decision temporarily halted executions, but its reversal in 1976 (*Gregg v. Georgia*) was tied to the prison-industrial complex’s expansion, not moral progress.
The US’s shift from public to private executions was not an evolution toward justice but a strategic consolidation of state violence under the guise of reform.
This transition reveals the carceral system’s reliance on secrecy to maintain racial control, a mechanism that aligns with historical patterns of lynching and colonial punishment. Indigenous legal systems, abolitionist movements, and international models of restorative justice all offer pathways to dismantle this legacy—but only if the US confronts its refusal to acknowledge executions as an ongoing tool of oppression. The trickster’s lesson here is clear: the shadows where executions now hide will not last forever, and the truth they conceal will demand reckoning.