Images From the University Gallery Museum. Those

¶ … images from the university gallery museum. Those works were the Victim, Abolish the Death Penalty, George Jackson Lives, Ruth Snyder, and Lynching. All five works examine how violence has become an institutionalized part of modern American society, so much so that it seems almost commonplace. Taken as a whole, the pieces are powerful, because they serve as a reminder that when violence is institutionalized and permitted, it creates an atmosphere of violence in society.

The images also serve as reminders that violence, whether government-sanctioned or individually driven, often targets those in society with the least power. While powerful people are not wholly immune from violence, they are not nearly as likely to be victimized as people in marginalized positions. The first work I examined is called The Victim. It depicts a skull-head type figure, done in stark blacks with some splashes of red, and it is clear the image in the artwork is not alive.

It features text at the bottom of the work that discusses the state-sanctioned killing of another person, and how that makes society more depraved than the crimes it seeks to punish. I am not necessarily opposed to the death penalty, even though logical arguments suggest that lifetime incarceration is less expensive and that the death penalty does not deter murders. There are some crimes where I believe the perpetrators deserve killing.

However, this work served to remind me that in every execution, there is a murder, and there is a victim. Of course, there is also the initial victim of the crime, but the state is sanctioning the taking of a human life.

If taking a human life is so inappropriate that it is a capital offense, how does the state justify taking that power onto itself and exercising it on its citizens, when alternatives that are just as effective in maintaining public safety, such as life in prison, exist? The reality is that the state should not debase itself and lower itself to the standards set by those people who are considered criminals, no matter how base and foul the crime.

The state is supposed to serve as a collective consciousness, not a collective subconscious. In Freudian terms, the state should be society's superego, but when society permits the death penalty, the state is acting as society's id, instead. In fact, it is easy to look at The Victim and see the skull-like image reflecting back not an individual, but the whole of what society has become.

In Abolish the Death Penalty, there is an image, black, which is not accidental, with red writing, imploring the State of Texas to Abolish the Death Penalty. The text included in the artwork suggests that the art of institutionalized killing has deadened the natural, human response to death. I actually disagree with this artwork in a significant way; I do not feel that the natural, human response to death is one of horror or outrage.

Instead, the natural, human response to death in the same social group is one of horror and outrage, but deaths in other groups seem to have little impact on the individual. All of human history has been plagued by groups fighting for dominance and killing one another for seemingly inconsequential reasons. These killings are considered justified because the people are "other." To me, this artwork suggests the same idea.

Texas is not an overwhelmingly black state, but its death row is very disproportionately black, as are the death rows in all capital punishment states. In fact, African-Americans are far more likely to end up with capital sentences than whites for crimes with the exact same factual patterns. Juries continue to be predominantly non-black, because blacks make up about 10% of the American population; even representative juries in heavily black areas will be unlikely to be more than 50% African-American.

To me, this poster suggests the fact that African-Americans are so much more likely to be executed than non-African-Americans, particularly if they have committed crime against whites. To me, the text should have spoken to the dehumanization of entire groups of people, rather than deadening of a human response to death. The third work I examined was George Jackson Lives.

My historical understanding of the events behind the trial of the San Quentin Six is very limited, so I did not react to the history of the artwork, but what I saw depicted in it. The work shows six black men, with neck shackles like one would see on slaves, and white gags on their mouths. To me, the image was clearly suggesting that whites were gagging black men, so that they could not receive justice.

The description of the artwork, which talks about the murder of George Jackson, a Black Panther, possibly at the hands of prison guards, and six men on trial for their alleged roles in the prison riots. Given my understanding of the racially biased prison system and its disproportionate racial composition, it does not seem a stretch to imagine black men's voices being silenced and black men being enslaved by the modern criminal justice system. In the artwork Ruth Snyder, one sees a woman in an electric chair.

Snyder was the first woman executed in the United States. The artwork recreates the photo taken of Snyder in the electric chair. I did not find the image particularly shocking, even with the description and Thurgood Marshall's statements that capital punishment must be changed from its cruel and empty mockery of justice. I know some of the history of Ruth Snyder's conviction. Unlike many.