ABSTRACT
Contemporary capital punishment in the United States – typically carried out through lethal injection – most often occurs in a highly medicalized and secluded execution chamber. However, the material process and technologic organization of these lethal injection executions have not developed in isolation. Indeed, they carry on a legacy of industrialized killing within what could today be understood as a post-industrial landscape of capital punishment. Capital punishment has its origins as a death-oriented disciplinary technique that was justified in liberal democracies as a moral necessity where capitalist values could be instilled. Through successive developments in the dominant methods of execution – electrocution and lethal gas in particular – these necrotechnologies reflect the industrialized landscapes in which they are situated. Electricity and chemical compounds used in execution chambers have elsewhere been vital energy sources in advancing technological development over the past two centuries. Where these technologies aid in development schemes elsewhere, within the penal system they are, rather, oriented toward producing deaths meant to aid in the disciplining of labor. This chapter assesses preconditions and developments in the spatial arrangement of executions through the lenses of geography scholarship that emphasizes material violence and materialist cultures to understand the industrial legacies embodied in contemporary lethal injections.
