state:
North Carolina
Local history:
Death and Life at Central Prison
Who is the death penalty for?
Duke University
Exhibiting Partner to be Announced

States of Incarceration is coming to Wilmington, NC

States of Incarceration is coming to the University of North Carolina Wilmington! Stay tuned for more information and a new local story!

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North Carolina: Death and Life at Central Prison
Who is the death penalty for?
Duke University

This project explores the past and present of the death penalty in North Carolina through changing technologies, constitutional controversies, philosophies of punishment, and social inequities. Our focus is Central Prison, the state's first prison and home of its death row. Between 1984 and 2015, the state of North Carolina executed forty-three people, but has not executed anyone since 2006. And in 2015, no one was sentanced to death. Our project seeks to place the death penalty in North Carolina in an international, intellectual, and historic context. It explains recent moratoria connected with racial inequity and constitutional questions of cruelty; reflects on the role of changing technologies in the death penalty process; and compares and contrasts imprisonment and punishment in North Carolina with punishment in Norway. Along the way it explores these basic questions: why, and how, and for whom do we administer lethal punishment?

Our Point of View

As undergraduate students at an elite southern university, we feel both separated from and implicated in the prison industrial complex, including capital punishment. Through this class we've thought about the commonplace nature of violence and our passive complicity. Many of us are interested in the role medical professionals play in keeping incarcerated people alive and administering lethal punishments, and chose to focus our project on the intersection of technology and human experience.

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North Carolina: Death and Life at Central Prison    Duke University
Who is the death penalty for?
North Carolina: Death and Life at Central Prison
Who is the death penalty for?
  Duke University

National Exhibition Venue    To be announced

Public Dialogues and Events
| September 1 – September 15, 2021

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