Book Review: Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri, Indigenous Criminology
| Author | Leanne Weber |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724912 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews for the state of the State Special Issue |
Theoretical Criminology 21(4)
death penalty as a morbid form of entertainment media devoid of genuine political mean-
ing, either as a form of moral reckoning with the state, or as a kind of Foucauldian “neu-
tralization” of criminal threat.
That said, while it is clear that LaChance appreciates the role of racism in changing
attitudes on capital punishment, the book’s outsized attention to racially endogenous
causes of white support for retributive justice inadvertently plays into broader cultural
attempts to whitewash the racist precipitants of modern death penalty. In “Inside your
daddy’s house” especially, LaChance centers on the emergence of psychopathy and
nihilism in white Cold War culture as a primary cause of the death penalty’s revival as a
symbol of moral integrity. In his subsequent discussion of rising violent crime in the
1960s and 1970s (p. 46ff.) he makes almost no mention of how criminal suspects and
prison populations from the real-life urban centers depicted in Dirty Harry and Death
Wish were becoming more Black and brown. LaChance does intermittently acknowledge
(e.g. Chapters 2 and 4) the role of white supremacist ideology in capital punishment
practice and cultural symbology. However, this strain of his analysis largely remains
peripheral and distinct from his exploration of the book’s core themes of vigilantism,
negative liberty, and personal responsibility, all of which are arguably—like whiteness
itself—fundamentally dependent on cultural, political, and economic exclusion of Blacks
and cultural minorities. Although no project can do everything, a fuller treatment of
white portrayals of Black and brown street crime in visual and print media would have
effectively balanced LaChance’s emphasis on white psychopathic killers.
This shortcoming, however, is more product of Executing Freedom’s ambitious scope
rather than of the author’s critical awareness. In all, Executing Freedom is a must-read
for socio-legal studies and punishment scholars who want to know more about how the
phenomenon of capital punishment took on a life of its own in the modern US cultural
imagination.
Cases
Furman v. Georgia, 408 US 238 (1972).
Gregg v. Georgia, 428 US 153 (1976).
Payne v Tennessee, 501 US 808 (1991).
Chris Cunneen and Juan Tauri, Indigenous Criminology, Policy Press: Bristol, 2016; 176 pp.:
9781447321750, £48.00 (hbk), 9781447321798 (ePub), 9781447321804 (Mobi).
Reviewed by: Leanne Weber, Monash University, Australia
Indigenous Criminology is the first title to be published in the New Horizons in
Criminology series edited by...
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