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Execution on Display: Visitor Reactions to Texas’ Electric Chair

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The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ((PSIPP))

Abstract

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has the busiest execution chamber in the USA. Between 1924 and 1964, Texas executed 361 men. Since the end of the national death penalty moratorium in 1982, Texas has executed 528 men and women (Fernandez and Schwartz 2014; Texas Department of Criminal Justice 2015). Texas was also the first state in the USA to execute using lethal injection (Marquart et al. 1994: 137). Given this volume of executions performed in Texas as well as the current controversies over the method of lethal injection, interpreting representations of this practice are critical to understanding the dynamics of capital punishment. Located in Huntsville, the heart of the Texas prison system, the Texas Prison Museum is the only cultural site where the public can gain information about Texas executions and cast their own eyes on the electric chair, “Old Sparky.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It was to the survey questions, “What was your immediate reaction to seeing the electric chair?” and “What do you think of the death penalty display?” and “What do you think visitors are supposed to take away from the death penalty display?” that visitors responded in this way. Over a third of survey respondents explicitly and implicitly discussed their political opinions of the death penalty, and many of these visitors used their viewpoints to answer more than one of the above questions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent Scholar, Houston, TX, USA

    Elizabeth Neucere

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  1. Elizabeth Neucere
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Neucere .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education and Arts, Federation University Australia, Ballarat, Australia

    Jacqueline Z. Wilson

  2. Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

    Sarah Hodgkinson

  3. Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Justin Piché

  4. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

    Kevin Walby

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Neucere, E. (2017). Execution on Display: Visitor Reactions to Texas’ Electric Chair. In: Wilson, J., Hodgkinson, S., Piché, J., Walby, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_38

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56134-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56135-0

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