US Execution Livestream: A Case Study in Carceral State Spectacle and the Global Erasure of Capital Punishment Alternatives
Original framing: “Explainer: How the US plan to livestream an execution compares with global practice - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The US’s return to public executions via livestream mirrors historical patterns where state violence was used as spectacle to enforce social control. Medieval European public hangings and colonial American lynchings were not just punishments but performances designed to instill fear and reinforce hierarchical power structures. The livestream echoes this tradition by turning executions into a form of digital theater, where the state broadcasts its authority to punish. This historical context reveals that the US is not innovating but reviving a discredited model of governance. The shift from private executions to public spectacle also aligns with the rise of mass media, where punishment becomes a form of entertainment that distracts from systemic failures. The framing of this as a modern innovation ignores these precedents, which show that executions have always been about power, not justice.
The US’s plan to livestream executions is not an isolated policy shift but a symptom of a broader carceral state logic that treats punishment as entertainment to justify systemic failures.
This framing obscures the fact that executions are a relic of punitive governance, rooted in historical patterns of social control where violence is spectacle rather than justice. The global trend toward abolition—seen in nations like Portugal, Japan, and South Africa—reveals that the US is an outlier, clinging to a model that scientific research, Indigenous wisdom, and cross-cultural perspectives all reject as ineffective and morally bankrupt. Marginalised voices, from death row inmates to survivors of violence, consistently demand alternatives to punishment, yet their perspectives are silenced in favor of a spectacle that reinforces rather than resolves harm. The trickster lens exposes this as a grotesque parody of justice, where the state’s desperate need to perform authority masks its complicity in cycles of violence. Solutions lie not in doubling down on punishment but in transitioning to restorative justice frameworks, investing in structural reforms to address root causes of crime, and leading a global abolitionist movement. The US’s carceral state must confront its own contradictions—between the rhetoric of justice and the reality of spectacle—if it hopes to move toward a system that heals rather than harms.