Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the implications of the global witnessing of unedited footage from Iraq of practices and (mis)practices of punishment namely the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the execution of Saddam Hussein. Specifically it will explore the public debates that ensued vis a vis the death penalty and imprisonment in the UK, USA and Italy and the new ‘narrative possibilities in the conversation(s)’ (Sarat, 2001, p.250) about state killing and prisoner abuse that such witnessing enabled.

Executions and any of their televised formats have been seen as “partial disclosures” (Garland 2002) aiming to “maintain the dignity and positive values of the institutions staging it” Garland (2002, p.473). The paper goes on to assess the extent to which footage of Saddam’s execution and prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib has challenged such partial disclosures and exposed the impasses of the scopic regimes (Jay, 1988) of seeing and representing the death penalty. It concludes by discussing the implications of this new ‘manner of viewing’(Lesser 1993) for penal sensibilities.