ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins with a brief overview of capital punishment in the US, highlighting the embodied experiences of prisoners living decades on death row, of inhabiting the life and death of the condemned. She focuses on conceptual categories of the carceral spaces rather than on any specific sites or institutions; offering a critical analysis of the shared carceral logics that inform their killing operations. The author highlights the ways that the prison death row/execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse have been similarly designed to kill and dispose of bodies, even if the intentions behind them are obviously different – killing to punish or simply eliminate, versus killing for food or other commodities. The material geographies of the prison execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse especially map uncannily well onto one another – their locations; their physical structures, spatial layout and design; as well as their technological and other control features that regulate movements within them.
