Book review: Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition
| Published date | 01 August 2012 |
| Date | 01 August 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480611425414 |
| Author | Simon A. Cole |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 367
David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition,
Belknap/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010; 471 pp.: 9780674057234,
US$35 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Simon A. Cole, University of California, Irvine, USA
While there is much good criminological work on various facets of capital punishment,
ranging from the deterrent effects of capital punishment to the relative persuasiveness of
various arguments against the death penalty, Peculiar Institution belongs to a different
genre. It is a comprehensive book that endeavors to examine and explain American capital
punishment as a whole. There are already, of course, several other such books, and
Peculiar Institution will surely take its place among them, as one of the best-written,
most thorough ly researched, and most thoughtful, nuanced, and complete accounts of US
capital punishment.
Peculiar Institution might be characterized as a sort of Foucauldian genealogy turned
upside down: rather than tracing the gradual birth of the prison, David Garland traces
the slow death of the death penalty. As have other scholars before him, Garland portrays
the death penalty as a product of historical contingency (e.g. Banner, 2002), fraught with
contradiction (e.g. Zimring, 2003), and ultimately a symbolic institution (e.g. Sarat, 2001).
Peculiar Institution differs from prior work, however, in its ambition to use a ‘theoretical
framework’ rooted in sociology that can explain both ‘The death penalty’s distribution
and use within the United States’ and ‘the international pattern’ (p. 192).
For example, Garland explains why Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 case in which the US
Supreme Court ruled capital punishment as then practiced in the United States unconsti-
tutional, failed to stick. Many interpreted this decision (incorrectly as it turned out) as the
de facto end of capital punishment in the USA, much as it had been in Europe as the popu-
lation ‘learned that it could live without’ capital punishment. Peculiar Institution generally
embraces the well-known ‘populism’ explanation for the failure of Furman to accomplish
this. The USA retains capital punishment, while Europe does not, because of a number of
ways in which our political system differs from most European systems: more individualistic
elections versus party lists; single-issue politics; regular, frequent elections; more populism
and less elitism in our politics in general, and so on.
Garland makes a convincing argument that it was, in retrospect, perhaps foolish to view
Furman as analogous to the retreat from capital punishment by European legislatures. The
US Supreme Court is a quite different institution than a European legislature, and Furman
succeeded only in politicizing the issue. It turned the Court into a target of conservative
opprobrium, and it furnished proponents of capital punishment with a compelling narrative
in which ordinary law-abiding citizens became ‘victims’ of an elitist Court. This narrative
was able to invoke democracy and states’ rights and to link itself to other issues, such as
racial segregation, in which the Court was seen as defying the will of the people, especially,
in this case, the South. Garland writes:
Capital punishment soon became caught up in a series of political and cultural conflicts that altered
its meaning. What had previously been a rarely used penal sanction dogged by moral controversy
was rapidly transformed into a hot-button political issue with multiple meanings, all of them highly
To continue reading
Request your trial