Book Review: Daniel LaChance, Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States
| Author | Bailey Socha |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617724910 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews for the state of the State Special Issue |
556 Theoretical Criminology 21(4)
can make important headway that matters for justice-involved individuals and their
families.
Ultimately, Progressive Punishment fills an important gap by providing an abolition-
ist critique of even the most progressive carceral projects. Schept concludes with a plea
that I wholeheartedly endorse: in all criminal justice reform conversations, we should
center reducing criminal justice contact rates. Attempts to do more good in the criminal
justice system in the USA must inevitably focus first on doing less harm.
Reference
The Sentencing Project (2017) U.S. prison population trends 1999–2015: Modest reductions with
significant variation. Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project.
Daniel LaChance, Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,
Chicago University Press: Chicago, IL, 2016; 260 pp.: 9780226066691, $35.00 (cloth), $35.00
(Ebook)
Reviewed by: Bailey Socha, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA
Just as capital punishment seemed to be dying out in the United States after the Second
World War, it re-emerged in the late 1970s as a wildly popular protest of both liberal big
government and the social problems its experts had failed to solve. For the next three
decades, historian Daniel LaChance argues in Executing Freedom, middle-class whites
participated in a cultural revival of retributive punishment hopelessly enmeshed in the
same big government bureaucracy they wanted to escape.
How is it, LaChance asks, that white Americans so distrustful of the government became
such staunch supporters of the killing state? Executing Freedom sets about answering this
puzzle by exploring the cultural life of capital punishment in film, television, and literature,
as well as through real-life cases of the death penalty and those who pursue it.
The book begins at a moment when middle-class white Americans were growing
disenchanted with the promises of postwar liberalism. Increasingly, whites saw the fed-
eral government as driven by the whims of liberal elites who wished to engineer society
instead of represent traditional (i.e. white) work-a-day interests.
Chapter 1 traces the cultural revival of the death penalty in the 1950s through the
1970s. Middle-class whites increasingly distrusted large bureaucracies and their profes-
sional staff, particularly psychiatrists, to cope with violent criminals. For answers to this
sudden shift, LaChance turns to films like the Dirty Harry series, and Death Wish, and
various novels which portrayed white male psychopathy—itself symptomatic of moral
decadence of modern culture—and how this fear was managed by creating a mythical
subject of the moral vigilante. The modern vigilante was just one expression of white
middle-class USA’s desire to “return to” the order of a simpler social and racial hierarchy
exemplified in western films and their modern iterations. Another expression was the
rebirth of the death penalty in “people’s collective imagination” (p. 50).
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore how white anxiety over the concept of freedom fueled the
rise of retributive punishment as a means to affirm negative liberty through the concept of
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