On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order for his Attorney General to pursue more death penalty convictions. Trump has built his base in part on exaggerating the threat of violent crime, and he now seeks to bring the issue of capital punishment back into crime-prevention debates. 

After multiple gruesome botched executions forced an eleven-year pause, Arizona is set to resume executions this week. Lethal injections will resume in Arizona despite an independent review commissioner saying he saw “chilling things” and believes they will repeat the same past mistakes. 

Socialists have always opposed the use of the death penalty as a deterrent against murder and violent crime in capitalist society. It is itself an act of extreme brutality, and it does not work. Study after rigorous study has found that the death penalty does not deter crime, and there is no “humane” way to carry it out—autopsies have consistently found evidence of horrific suffering with every method of execution. 

Twenty years ago, I traveled to spend a weekend with my friend Kevin on death row in Indiana State Prison, two days before he was to be executed. I had been visiting Kevin for 13 years. 

On Wednesday, July 27, 2005, Kevin’s sister watched from her seat while her brother was given a lethal injection. Debbie, along with a group of journalists and state officials, witnessed Kevin’s murder by the state of Indiana. 

At age 22, Kevin was found guilty of a gang-related murder spree for which he received a double death penalty. His incarceration in 1992 also coincided with the beginning of the dramatic rise of mass incarceration which saw the U.S. prison population grow five-fold over 20 years. This shift to longer and wider imprisonment was also accompanied by a move away from rehabilitation and toward the mass warehousing of prisoners, along with the rise of private for-profit prisons.

Within the so-called U.S. “Justice system,” those on death row are a relatively small fraction of the prison population: some 2,100 prisoners nationally. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 there have been 1,612 people executed by hanging, gas chamber, electrocution, or lethal injection. 

The death penalty, mirroring America, is also dramatically racist. Death row prisoners are disproportionately Black, and the vast majority of capital punishment crimes are the result of the murder of a white person.

Death Row Is Populated By America’s Poor

During the 1990s, Kevin’s girlfriend Lisa organized a petition against capital punishment which she left on the counter of the convenience store she worked at. When she explained to people that only the poorest Americans who could not afford a decent lawyer ended up on death row, most people would sign. 

No one on death row is wealthy—90% of capital punishment defendants had a free, court-appointed lawyer. In Kevin’s case, his public defender fell asleep during his trial.

Almost all European countries have outlawed capital punishment, however it continues to be prevalent in Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia, among many other countries. The death penalty is essentially used by these governments as an attempt at social control, and to create fear.

In the United States, there has been a dramatic decline in violent crime since the 1990s. In the 1980s there was on average 750 assaults per 100,000 people. By the early 2020s, that had gone down to well below 400. There are many debates about the cause or correlation of this sharp decline, including the prohibition of leaded gasoline. This theory argues there is a direct correlation between the current generation of less violent young adults who grew up without exposure to leaded gasoline.  

U.S. Violence

The U.S. is in reality the most violent of all the advanced capitalist countries. The poorest people in the U.S. grow up in a world marred by police violence, gang shootings and robberies. Physical violence and coercion are embedded in societies that are extremely unequal, such as the U.S., South Africa, or Brazil. 

Historically, U.S. foreign policy has been the most violent of any society ever. The carpet bombing of North Vietnam by the U.S. Air Force included dropping almost half a ton of explosives per person during the ten-year war. The U.S. is still the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons on civilian populations: its atomic bombing of Japan created a 7,000-degree fireball, burning alive up to 200,000 people in a few minutes. 

Trump’s executive order on the death penalty will not make the U.S. a safer place to live. It is another attempt to create scapegoats for the crimes that are expressions of the gross inequality in this society. Death row prisoners are easy targets. Most were raised in violent or abusive environments and increasing punishments for crime will not solve society’s problems. Escalating violence and aggression is a very real reflection of the dead end that capitalist society represents.

Kevin, politicized by his imprisonment, once wrote to me, “I see the work you’re doing out there and it aggravates me that I cannot reach the people. I often think of what I could have done with all the knowledge I have today, if I’d had it then, among the people I was surrounded by who worked hard and never had nothing. I can’t negate the experience because in here I found the answers and direction I was seeking out there, but now to what avail? It’s almost a cruel act of fate.”

In Kevin’s last letter to me, sent hours before his July 2005 execution and received the day after his death, he signed off, “keep the struggle alive, in solidarity.” In a world where we have very little, working people will always have solidarity and the struggle against all oppression.