'Time bomb waiting to explode

As the execution of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams on 13 December in California captured the world's attention, another Williams, who narrowly escaped that fate, has written of life on death row. By Marina Da Silva

‘I  could see the metal helmets, steel batons, tazer guns, and the padded vests they were wearing as they came into the corridor, walking in a straight line like an army platoon.” This was not a prisoner's revolt brought to heel in a South American dictatorship, just how Nanon McKewn Williams was greeted while being transferred to death row when he refused the humiliation of being strip-searched.
The treatment in American prisons is no secret – worse than in any other democratic country – and capital punishment hits hardest at the underprivileged, in particular ethnic minorities: 72.5 per cent of death row prisoners are African Americans or Hispanics. As Jacques Derrida wrote in 1995: “About 3,000 people are waiting for death by hanging, electrocution, gas chamber, lethal injection or firing squad.”
“I was such a bitter young man that I was like a time bomb waiting to explode”, writes Williams. In 1995, then only 17, he was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. The only reason he escaped capital punishment is that in March 2005 the United States Senate voted in a law commuting death penalties to life imprisonment for those who were minors when the event occurred.
How did Williams endure those 10 years during which he experienced endless abuse, took part in riots brought chaotically under control, witnessed the execution of over 200 of his fellow prisoners? He tells of a closed, sadistic, inhuman universe that numbs all feelings. He writes of physical, intellectual and ethical resistance - the resistance of a very young man who matures and regains a certain freedom through reading and writing, and builds up his ability to resist.
As you close this astonishing book, you wonder whether you are dreaming, whether this could really have taken place in today's America. That's the moment when images from Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo come to mind.
© Le Monde diplomatique
This article is from the December issue of Le Monde diplomatique's English language edition
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