Abstract
In the United States, life without parole (LWOP) has become the leading alternative to the death penalty. However, we have compelling reason to be suspicious what passes for the abolition of the death penalty. If, with the death penalty, we have the calculation of the precise moment a life will end, with LWOP we have a different sort of calculation: however long the life of the accused, that will be length of punishment appropriate to this crime. The only possible life after a sentence of LWOP would be the afterlife of civil and social death. This chapter moves between Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty, his interview “Death Penalties,” and the written reflections of people serving LWOP sentences, particularly Spoon Jackson, and people condemned to die to interrogate the leading “alternative” to the death penalty and to continue the work of thinking deconstructive abolitionism.
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