Moral Injury on Death Row

For the past 7 years I have taught inside/out classes on Tennessee's Death Row and at the Tennessee Prison for Women.  My experiences have provided a laboratory for questions of moral injury, harm, and repair, often in extremis.  As a social ethicist, I intend to draw on my work on Death Row to provide a kind of moral ethnography of moral injury within the context of the American criminal justice system.  As a society, the United States has developed a highly retributive system of justice.  Compared to other post-industrial societies, the US has the most punitive approach to crime, and is exceptional for its continued use of the death penalty as a mechanism of justice.

Moral injury, as a concept, was introduced and popularized by the VA psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, with the publication of Achilles in Vietnam.  Like it's sister term, PTSD, MI sought to provide a more adequate and robust descriptive and diagnostic term for the qualities of experience reported by many combat veterans, specifically the arousal of disturbed moral emotions of shame, guilt and self-disgust, as a consequence of the experience of violence, particularly the violelnce delivered through one's own hands.  Moral injury's symptomology includes increased suicidality, substance abuse, despression and despair, numbness and disrupted relationships.  More particularly, moral injury also includes a devastation of one's sense of morality and one's sense of oneself as a moral agent.  In brief, at its fullest expression, moral injury decimates one's trust in oneself, in the institutional order, and in the possiblity of morality, to such a degree that its victim struggles mightily to situate themselves in a meaningful world.  They are adrift, without sufficient moorings, to anchor themselves aginst the inevitable waves that life brings.  They are, to invoke a nautical metaphor, morally shipwrecked.

Like PTSD, this description of moral shipwreck has migrated beyond the context of war.  Indeed, the term has been translated across a range of institutional and practical settings, most recently by healthcare workers in the shadow of COVID, but also in the context of the criminal justice system, and within its institutions of punishment.  In this paper, I intend to explore my own experiences as well as the experiences of insiders on death row to excavate and elaborate on the utility of the concept of moral injury for those imprisoned and isolated in the US.

It is clear to me that moral injuries are characteristic of prison-life, from the social and familial violence that often preceded the violenced that landed people in prison, to the ongoing violence to which the imprisoned are subjected through the brutality of prison practice, to the secondhand exposure to violence that is endemic to the experience.  All along the trajectory of prison life, often from the cradle to crime to conviction to cell, the occasions for moral injury proliferate. 

Death Row is an important site for exploring moral injury in the criminal justice system for several reasons.  Perhaps most obviously, every conviction starts with a murder.  The men I know on death row have all had up close experiences with violent death.  They have been exposed to the visceral consequences of murder, starting with the physicality of it -- the "blood, guts, and gore" of the battlefield -- is also a reality of most murder scenes.  So, too, is the grievous sense of self-betrayal of one's own moral values, or at the very least an excruciating sense of moral conflict, that is often, though not always, a part of the experience of taking the life of another, whether combatant, enemy, intimate or mere obstacle to another desired end.  But the moral injury landscape does not end here.  The imprisoned reguarly report the morally injurious experience of being reduced to an animal or monster.  The process of arrest, trial, conviction and punishment represents its own potentially morally injurious sequence of events.  In a word, the dehumanization of the "process" of criminal justice in the US is fraught with potential moral injury.

An important -- indeed, central -- element of this paper, then, will be to theorize moral injury and describe how it is an apt descriptive and diagnostic term for teh experience of life for those imprisoned on death row.  I will draw on a broad range of literature from religion, ethics and philosophy, including JM Berstein's Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury, and Aaron Pratt Shepherd's "Loyalty, Betrayal, and Atonement: A Philosophy of Moral Injury."  However, this theorizing is in the service of the practice of repair, particularly for those I have come to know on death row.  Thus, the second half othe paper will take up this question of moral repair after catastrophe.  How does one come back or recover or heal from the experience of moral injury?  What can life look like after violence, particularly catastrophic violences, such as rape, murder or torture?  In this section, I will turn to the recent work of Judith Herman, Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, as well as investigating more deeply the resources of restorative and transformative justice, as alternative conceptualizations of harm, punishment,and the meaning of justice.  Finally, I will interview military and Veteran's Administration Chaplains, whom I know through Vanderbilt's Chaplaincy D.Min. program.  These chaplains have been deeply engaged in work with morally injured veterans, and promise to be important interlocutors for developing a curriculum, set of practices, and even policy recommendations to redress the realities of those who suffer moral injuries in our prisons and on our death rows.

In conclusion, I believe my work with insiders gives me a particular window through which to witness the experiences of moral injury within our prisons, which are often opaque to us.  And so I hope to use this paper to translate the concept of moral injury to be a resource for both those who seek to theorize about punishment as well as those who work to meet the needs of our fellow human beings who find themselves inprisoned and dehumanized in our current system.