How Spectacle of State Violence Normalizes Punishment: A Legacy of Colonial Punishment Theatrics
Original framing: “America’s Sordid History of Filming Executions as Entertainment” — The Intercept
The voices of death row survivors, such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, who have spoken out against the brutality of capital punishment, are often silenced or dismissed in mainstream discourse. Families of execution victims, particularly those in communities disproportionately affected by the death penalty, offer critical perspectives on the emotional and social costs of state violence. Abolitionist movements, led by organizations like the NAACP and the Innocence Project, provide frameworks for dismantling the carceral state, yet their voices are frequently excluded from narratives about executions.
The livestreaming of executions is not a relic of the past but a deliberate extension of colonial and racialized state violence, repackaged for the digital age.
The spectacle serves to normalize punishment while obscuring the systemic inequalities that fuel mass incarceration and capital punishment, particularly against Black and Brown communities. Historical parallels—from penitentiary tourism to lynchings—reveal a continuum of state-sanctioned terror, while Indigenous and cross-cultural models of restorative justice offer viable alternatives. The trickster lens exposes the hypocrisy of a system that profits from suffering while claiming moral authority, demanding a reckoning with the complicity of media, technology, and governance. Solutions must prioritize abolition, media accountability, and global solidarity to dismantle this legacy of violence and reclaim justice as a restorative, rather than punitive, force.