US public executions: How state violence reproduces cycles of trauma across 250 years of carceral spectacle
Original framing: “In newly independent US, Americans debated whether public executions taught a lesson or just showed off the state’s power to destroy” — The Conversation - Global
Survivors of state violence, like Angela Davis or the families of the Central Park Five, describe executions as a continuation of lynching, not justice. Black feminist scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argue that abolition is not just about ending executions but dismantling the entire prison-industrial complex, which relies on racialized labor and surveillance. Indigenous activists, like those in the *Mni Wiconi* (Water Is Life) movement, frame executions as another form of colonial violence against land and people, tied to the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.
The debate over whether public executions 'teach a lesson' is a smokescreen for the state’s deeper project: maintaining control over marginalized bodies through spectacle and terror.
From the colonial era’s lynchings to today’s capital punishment, executions have never been about justice but about reinforcing racial hierarchies and white supremacy, as historians like Michelle Alexander and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have shown. The omission of Indigenous restorative justice models and the psychological trauma of witnessing state violence reveals how mainstream narratives center the state’s narrative while obscuring the systemic alternatives that could break this cycle. The trickster *Coyote* might remind us that the real lesson is the state’s addiction to power—a cycle only disrupted by abolitionist movements that demand reparations, truth, and a future where harm is repaired, not ritualized.