It was 1 a.m. July 13, 1984, when Michael Radelet made the decision to publicly denounce the death penalty. He’d just said goodbye to David Washington, a convicted triple-murderer who died in the electric chair six hours later. As he accompanied Washington’s wife and daughters out of the Florida State Prison’s death row, their pleas echoed.

“They just kept crying, ‘Please don’t kill my Daddy,’” recalls Radelet, a CU Boulder sociology professor. “That’s when I first came to realize that in many ways, the death penalty punishes the family and society as much as the inmate.”

Radelet’s research, dating to the 1970s, was among the first to show innocent people sometimes get executed and that race plays a key role in determining who lands on death row. Through 50 “last visits” with inmates (including infamous serial killer Ted Bundy) in the hours before their execution, he has also illuminated life inside death row and the toll capital punishment leaves behind.

Twelve years before Washington’s execution, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that death penalty statutes as written in most states failed to provide clear standards on who got the death penalty and what constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” and were, thus, unconstitutional.

“A number of people thought we would never see another execution again in the United States,” recalls Radelet, a CU faculty member since 2001.

But soon, states began to recraft their statutes to try to meet the court’s objections, and the death penalty was revived. 

According to a data set Radelet has compiled, executioners have put 1,532 people to death since in the U.S., including 17 in 2020 alone — 10 under the direction of the federal government. Today there are 2,500 people on America’s death rows. 

At least 185 wrongly convicted people have been exonerated after being sentenced to death. And, according to his own research originally published in 1987, at least 23 innocent people were executed in the U.S. between 1905 and 1974.

Then, there is the race issue.

Since 1981, when Radelet first showed that those accused of murdering white victims are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murder Black victims, study after study has confirmed this finding. In one, Radelet found that cases with a white female victim were 10 times more likely to result in a death sentence than similar homicides with a male victim of color. 

Thanks in part to Radelet’s 100 research papers and dozens of testimonies, lawmakers have begun to turn against the death penalty. This includes Colorado, which in 2020 became the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty. 

His work has not gone unnoticed. The nation’s largest anti-death penalty organization recently honored Radelet for a lifetime of research examining the true societal costs of capital punishment.

“We are in a position to believe that many of us will see total abolition of the death penalty in our lifetimes.” 

Radelet tuned in virtually, accepting the Death Penalty Focus Abolition Award with a statement that seemed impossible for so many years: “We are in a position to believe that many of us will see total abolition of the death penalty in our lifetimes,” he said. 

In all, 10 U.S. states abolished the death penalty in the 2000s, and 142 countries have banned the practice. In 2019, California — home to the country’s largest death row — put a moratorium on capital punishment. And many believe President Joe Biden will, at minimum, commute existing federal death sentences to life. 

Radelet, who retires from teaching this year, has played no small role in driving that progress. 

Seated in his office, clutching a hand-written goodbye letter Bundy wrote to him before he went to the electric chair, Radelet likens his last visits to hospice work. In their final hours, he says, even a convicted murderer deserves the grace of a listening ear. 

Some have accused him of sympathizing with criminals. He disagrees. 

“You don’t oppose the death penalty because these guys are all great citizens. You oppose it because of what it does to society.”

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Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

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A CU professor goes inside America's prisons to study gang life.

Seated inside a windowless, soundproof room at the county jail in Fresno, Calif., David Pyrooz was getting nervous.

Across from him sat a gang member awaiting trial for murder, his slick-bald head tattooed with a devil’s horn above each temple. His eyes were darting, a sign that — as Pyrooz’s professors had warned — the interviewee might be growing impatient.

Pyrooz, then a 22-year-old criminology student, glanced at the button on the wall he’d been instructed to press in case of trouble.

The inmate spoke: “You know, you have to hold that button for two seconds before someone will come.”

David Pyrooz, assistant professor of sociology 

“I remember thinking ‘A lot can happen in two seconds,’” Pyrooz said. He paused, reestablished eye contact and asked the next question.

Fast forward 12 years and Pyrooz, an assistant professor of sociology at CU Boulder, has interviewed hundreds of gang members in correctional facilities and on the streets, searching for insight into how some people manage to avoid or escape what he calls “the snare” of gang life, while others succumb to it and suffer lifelong consequences.

His research comes at a time when 33,000 violent gangs with 1.4 million members are active in the United States and gang violence — though down from its 1990s peak — still plagues cities like Denver and Chicago, where 50 percent of homicides are gang-related. The Trump administration has named one gang, MS-13, “one of the gravest threats to American public safety.”

Pyrooz, with several high-profile papers newly published and the largest-ever study of imprisoned gang members in the works, hopes his research can prevent youth from joining gangs and help veteran members escape. His colleagues say the work could also shed light on the power of groupthink and its hold over all of us.

“I have always been fascinated by social groups whose collective power is greater than the sum of their individual parts,” said Pyrooz, a married father of two young children. “We all like to think our accomplishments come from individual merit, but so much of our success is driven by the people in our environment. If it weren’t for the gang, things might have turned out differently for a lot of these guys.”

Dodging the Snare

Pyrooz grew up in California in the 1990s, splitting his time between his dad’s house in the Bay Area, where the Norteno gang ruled, and his mom’s house in the Central Valley, Sureno turf.

By 6th grade, he was noticing groups hanging out by their cars, rap music booming, gang signs flashing. Roadside buildings were emblazoned with graffiti.

By high school, some of his friends were in gangs.

33,000 violent gangs with 1.4 million members are active in the U.S.

Instead, he made salutatorian and landed a scholarship to California State University, where he volunteered to help a criminology professor with research at the local jail. Those first interviews fed his curiosity about what makes “us” and “them” so different — or whether we really are.

“I was struck by how, in many ways, these guys behind bars were not much different than me or my friends,” Pyrooz said. “They just got caught doing something, and once they got into that web that is the criminal justice system, they had a hard time getting out.”

Later, during doctoral studies at Arizona State University, Pyrooz explored a question few others had: How does joining a gang as a teen — as 8 percent of U.S. adolescents do — impact life later on for the gang member?

He found sobering answers: Joiners were 30 percent less likely to earn a high school diploma, 60 percent less likely to earn a college degree, more likely to be unemployed as an adult and lose tens of thousands of dollars in potential earnings — and 100 times more likely to die by homicide.

One subsequent study, subsidized by the Google Ideas think tank, explored how gangs use the Internet. (To brag about their exploits and keep tabs on other members, but generally not for recruitment, it found.) Another looked at similarities between gang members and domestic terrorists (not many, he found).

The closest of the seven prisons near David Pyrooz's old office was a 10-minute walk. He would often watch the newly released inmates file out, ready to start a new life, and wonder how they would do.

“What David has done that few others have is place gang membership in the context of what came before it and after it,” said Scott Decker, foundation professor of criminology at ASU. “That kind of understanding is critical when it comes to thinking about how to address this problem.”

The Art of the Interview

Before arriving at CU in 2015, Pyrooz taught at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, a.k.a. “Prison City U.S.A.,” because of its seven correctional facilities.

The closest was a 10-minute walk from his office. He’d often watch newly released inmates file out, ready to start a new life, and wonder how they would do. 

There, he and Decker embarked on a monumental project. They began interviewing 800 inmates, half gang members, half not, 48 hours before they were released, then followed up with them 30 days and nine months later.

The project, still going, has been both gratifying and emotionally taxing, Pyrooz said.

He begins each interview by shaking the inmate’s hand, a gesture that — for someone who has not experienced human touch for months — can go a long way toward establishing trust and rapport. He breaks the ice with a friendly question: What are you most looking forward to eating when you get out?

“The number one thing I want to do is treat them as another human being, not a prisoner,” he said.

Then the stories pour out: A six-figure-salary businessman who landed in prison for a white-collar crime and joined the Mexican mafia for protection. A member of a motorcycle gang who got in trouble for fighting, landed in jail and took up with the Aryan Brotherhood. A young man who, at 18, fell in love with a 16-year-old girl. When the relationship went sour, her mom called the police. He was charged with statutory rape, went to prison, joined a gang, and never left.

Especially hard to hear are the stories of fathers who missed their children’s lives and of inmates in solitary confinement, whom Pyrooz talks with through a mesh wall.

“You just see a lot of lost potential,” he said. “You go home at night wondering what these guys might have been doing if they weren’t behind those bars. You also wonder: Are they really ready to get out?”

The Takeaways

His research has already produced some key conclusions.

First, it’s important to keep kids out of gangs, as 90 percent of juvenile crimes are committed in groups, and membership’s long-term consequences are grave.

Second, the way kids spend their time, and with whom, matters.

“Working to keep kids busy and monitor their activities, particularly the friends with whom they hang out, along with instilling in children good moral values and coping skills, are the ways in which we can keep youth out of gangs,” said Pyrooz, with a nod to his own attentive parents.

You see a lot of lost potential.

Many inmates he’s interviewed ultimately left their gangs, pulled away by the attractions of other groups comprised of wives or girlfriends, children and grandchildren, employers and friends.

“The stereotype is that these guys are violent predators with zero empathy for other people,” Pyrooz said. “Some of that is true, they have done some very bad stuff. But they still love their kids and want to see their families be successful. If you look at them at one point in time, they may look like the worst person out there, but even that person can change.”

Photos by Getty Images/Jan Sochor/CON

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A CU English professor takes new students under his wing at a Colorado state prison. 

At first the idea was for Adam Bradley to show up once and talk about poetry and pop culture, one of his academic specialties. 

Then he met the inmates of the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility face to face. 

Bradley, a CU English professor, saw he might be useful to them, but also that lessons in rhyme and meter weren’t what they needed or wanted most. 

Four years later, he’s leading a small CU Boulder team that’s helping inmates of Arkansas Valley, a state prison east of Pueblo, teach each other — not poetry, political science or physics, but personal transformation. 

Working closely with Derek Briggs and Elena Diaz-Bilello of CU’s School of Education, Bradley is helping a handful of driven prisoners develop a rigorous curriculum with clear learning objectives and measurable outcomes. 

The goal, Bradley said, is to help “move people from a position of being takers, people who are acting in ways that are destructive, into people who are builders.” 

The project draws less on his scholarly expertise than on his pedagogical and organizational skills and his willingness to listen and share, and that’s fine with him. 

“Whether you are in Hellems or in a correctional facility, the rudiments of the classroom don’t change,” he said. “It’s about interaction, how to keep ideas flowing, how to let as many voices as you can join the conversation.” 

So far, Bradley has visited Arkansas Valley three times and spent many hours on the phone with the inmate driving the project, Rhidale Dotson, who’s serving a life sentence without possibility of parole for his role in a murder. In the future, Bradley expects to visit almost monthly. 

It’s a matter of citizenship, he  said, of belief in the possibility of change, of making the most of his privileged position in society as a university professor. 

“I’m committed to ensuring that we don’t throw people away,” he said.

Photo by Glenn Asakawa

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CU in 1967

16,877

Total fall enrollment

$286

Tuition per year for Colorado residents

$1,134

Tuition per year for non-residents (beginning fall 1967)

FIRST

Ralphie run through Folsom Field

$2

Cost to see student production of Oklahoma! at Macky Auditorium

4,700

Students voting in a Nov. 8 campus election: Topics included the Vietnam War and the legalization of marijuana

50

Pages in The Seer, a booklet published by CU student government evaluating teachers and courses 

For Heartbreak, Try...Anything 

We might have more control over the pain of romantic rejection than we realize, according to new research led by CU Boulder scientists.

In a brain-imaging study of 40 subjects recently involved in an “unwanted romantic breakup,” researchers found that administering a placebo — basically, a fake medicine — diminished both negative feelings and also activity in brain regions associated with rejection.

“Doing anything that you believe will help you feel better will probably help you feel better,” said CU’s Leonie Koban, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology and neuroscience and the study’s lead author.

The research paper, “Frontal-brainstem pathways mediating placebo effects on social rejection,” was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For further details, visit . 

Heard Around Campus 

"There is probably not as much gang-joining happening in prison as we once thought." 

— CU Boulder criminologist David Pyrooz, author of recent research that casts doubt on the common belief that prisons foster gangs. 

Venture Capital 

A sports-related film editing platform, an adjustable socket for prosthetic legs and a digital networking platform for aspiring musicians took home the top prizes at CU Boulder’s ninth annual New Venture Challenge competition in April.

In all, entrepreneurs won nearly $100,000 in awards and investments.

Established in 2009, the challenge is a business development and mentorship program for CU Boulder students, faculty and staff. Teams form in the fall, develop their ideas during the academic year and pitch them to a panel of judges in the spring.

The 2016-17 winners are, respectively, Give & Go (film), ReForm (prosthetic socket) and Gigsicians (musician networking).

The challenge maintains lists of winners at .

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