ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the physical and social characteristics, custodial fixations, loneliness, violence, danger, and fear found on death row. Death row confinement is experienced as a totality, it examines this totality of human suffering. A range of insoluble problems emerge on death row to torment the prisoners. Their families, their keepers, and their peers are each implicated as sources of stress. The controlled deportment of the prisoners, which is documented in low rates of disciplinary infractions on death row, belies the staff’s portrait of them as desperate and promiscuously violent men. The men on death row often prop up flagging egos through recourse to the prison’s image of manliness, a fiction that requires men in adversity to appear proud, impervious, and self-sufficient. Some death row inmates, attuned to the bitter irony of their predicament, characterize their existence as a living death and themselves as the living dead. Emotional death lies at the core of the experience of living death.
