This photo series — “No Seconds” by Henry Hargreaves — recreates the last meals that were served to death row inmates.
Not surprisingly, I have a lot of problems with the concept and with its popularity. Here are a few of those problems, in no particular order:
- The entire idea of the last meal is, if you’ll forgive the pun, in bad taste. “We’re going to strap you down and kill you,” we say. “But we’re not barbarians: You can have anything you’d like for dinner before we do.”
- We document and discuss the meal, as if we’ll be able to divine something about the condemned inmate from his or her choice of ice cream. We would do a whole lot better if we looked into the circumstances that led the inmate to this meal. For example, “The state didn’t intervene when his stepfather beat him mercilessly as an eight-year-old, but it made sure to cook his steak medium-rare before poisoning him to death at age forty.”
- We are reducing a human life to a meal. This highlights our general disrespect for human dignity (perfectly, I might add, since the meal goes along with a legal homicide). One has to wonder how perception of these photos would change if they were presented alongside photos of the condemned men and women as young children.
- We are ignoring the pain and suffering of the victims, co-victims, and family members. No information about them is presented at all, unless it is grisly information about how they — completely nameless and faceless — helped to propel the inmate to this meal.
This is, at bottom, little more than simple voyeurism. And, as someone who spent a fair amount of time in conversation with death row inmates and with murder victims’ family members, I find it a particularly grotesque form. We want to look at the lives of murderers, to assess the peculiarities of these monsters, and then to feel better about ourselves. What we don’t want to do is to have a frank conversation about the ways in which the death penalty system in this country is racist, classist, arbitrary, and unfair.
Taking a peek at what my friend Ronnie Frye ate before he was poisoned to death seems to suit us just fine. But it’s very clear that taking a peek at the barbarism of a society that cheers at the judicial murder of a particular subset of its citizens does not suit us nearly so well. So we do the one with a bemused smile on our faces and we studiously avoid the other.
(Source: Dripbook; HT: W. Thomas Webb)
I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly these photos disturb me — now I have a better idea. I considered removing them and just reblogging the text, but maybe we should be disturbed.
(Source: consumerbehaviourself)
