Condemned to Die: Life Under Sentence of Death

By Robert Johnson

FROM THE PREFACE: “Most Americans favor capital punishment. The reasons vary, but many proponents of the death penalty believe that executions prevent murder. Capital punishment, for them, is an antidote to homicide. Simple vengeance is enough for others, who insist that killers should suffer the ultimate penalty for their grievous crimes. A few adopt the pose of the cool, detached pragmatist. They contend that the death penalty pays its own way by eliminating hardened and unrepentant offenders. These dead men, however dangerous in life, commit no more crimes. Whatever the real or imagined merits of capital punishment, no rationale for the death penalty demands warehousing of prisoners under sentence of death. The punishment is death and nothing more. There is neither a mandate nor a justification for inhumane confinement prior to imposition of sentence. Yet warehousing for death, of an empty and sometimes brutal nature, is the universal fate of condemned prisoners. The enormous suffering caused by this human warehousing, rendered in the words of the prisoners themselves, is the subject of this book.”

Illinois. Waveland Press. 1981. 163p.