Closure: new scholarship
Susan Andes has just released fascinating new scholarship on murder and closure over at SSRN. Prof. Andes’ article is aptly entitled Victims, ‘Closure’, and the Sociology of Emotion. A first read suggests that the piece adds substantial strength to the argument that proved so powerful in New Jersey, the death penalty does nothing to achieve closure for victims.
From that article:
The theme of closure has reframed the entire death penalty debate. For many years, support for the death penalty was premised on its deterrent function. More recently, the weight of empirical evidence has rendered the deterrence rationale increasingly tenuous. Retribution, the major alternative rationale, has always been a harder sell. Retribution at one time sounded too close to revenge, and made people uncomfortable. The language of healing and closure has provided a way to soften the retribution rationale. If the death penalty can help survivors heal, then retribution can be viewed as therapy rather than bloodlust. Thus the notion of closure provides a rationale for our continuing commitment to the capital system. At the same time, the perceived requisites of closure have fueled changes in the structure of capital system, including the victim impact statement, truncated appeals, and broadened categories of death eligibility. In this way the feedback loop perpetuates itself. We have promised survivors that the system can give them closure, and the institution of capital punishment now needs to exist to give survivors the closure we’ve promised them. Unfortunately, this therapeutic promise has little to do with the actual workings of our capital system: it’s a poster child for the dangers of engrafting the private language of emotion onto a complex, hierarchical and coercive governmental entity.
The abstract after the jump.
From the abstract:
The concept of closure, almost unknown two decades ago, has had a meteoric rise. It has been enthusiastically embraced by the legal system not only as a legitimate psychological state, but as one that the criminal justice system ought to help victims and murder survivors to attain. In the death penalty context, the concept of closure has changed the way we talk about the rationale for capital punishment, it has changed the shape of the legal process, and it has even changed what both survivors and jurors in capital cases expect to feel. Yet, as I will illustrate, the term closure in fact connotes several different and poorly differentiated concepts, each with separate and quite serious implications for the conduct of the capital trial. For example, depending on how closure is understood, it might require a chance to give public testimony, an opportunity to meet with the accused, a more expeditious trial, a sentence of death, or an execution. Yet there is inadequate evidence on whether any of these institutional processes or outcomes can actually contribute to a state of closure for survivors.As current research in disciplines including cognitive neuroscience, sociology, psychology, and political science suggests, emotions are dynamic processes that evolve in a reciprocal relationship with social structures. As the legal system becomes increasingly invested in helping victims and survivors achieve closure, we need to take a hard look at the emotional content of this concept, and at how it affects, and is affected by, the institutional framework in which it operates.
