ABSTRACT
The personal lives of capital offenders suggest that there are many individual pathways to death row, but virtually all of them were created by society long before the individual offenders embarked on their personal journeys to this bleak and forsaken setting at the deep end of the justice system. The men on death row also share infamy as a part of their grim biographies, at least for a short time. Caryl Chessman, a long-term death row prisoner put to death by the state of California, studied the media distortion of capital offenders, particularly of the type likely to enrage decent citizens. Stereotypes of the capital-offender-as-a-monster are the product of what Chessman termed the media’s “big buildup.” This “big buildup” culminates in support for capital punishment as the necessary extermination of the monsters housed on death row. Survival was a struggle featuring violence and crime.
