Book review: Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S.
| Author | Steven Chermak |
| Published date | 01 August 2012 |
| Date | 01 August 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480612436531 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 369
Relatedly, there is the curious use of evolutionary or ecological language in Peculiar
Institution’s characterization of capital punishment, in its effort to emphasize that
contemporary capital punishment is a different thing than historical forms of capital pun-
ishment. Thus, quoting Thomas Lacquer, Garland writes that capital punishment ‘is like
an endangered species brought back from the brink of extinction, a creature from an earlier
age making its way in a very different time from when it ruled the earth’. Garland himself
then writes that capital punishment ‘adapted to its late-modern American environment’
(p. 19). Elsewhere, capital punishment ‘adapted to its new context and purposes’ (p. 92).
And again, that ‘Late-modern capital punishment is ... reasonably well adapted to the
purposes that it s erves’ (p. 286), but those purposes, Garland asserts, are not deterrence
or retribution but rather symbolism and politics. This language, of course, makes for a nice
metaphor, but for anthropomorphic evolutionary theory. Capital punishment is not a ‘thing’
with a ‘will’ to adapt to changing ecologies and survive another day. In biological evolu-
tion, the species (or, in this case, the institution) does not seek to adapt; rather, adaptation
occurs through natural selection which occurs through individual organisms driven to
reproduce. It is not clear what mechanism would enable capital punishment to ‘adapt’ in
this way. It might be argued that it is the human exploiters of capital punishment—the
politicians who, as Garland shows in brilliant detail, cynically engaged in death penalty
discourse ‘not because they were persuaded of capital punishment’s penological efficacy,
but because they were certain of its political benefits’ (p. 245)—who provide this mecha-
nism, but this, it seems, is to impute to these actors rather too much intentionality, foresight,
and control over historically contingent events. Perhaps this is all just a metaphor, but it
seems symptomatic of the way Peculiar Institution seeks to argue, in what may strike some
readers as an overly structuralist or teleological way, that we have a ca pital punishm ent
system perfectly adapted to our politics and culture.
References
Banner S (2002) The Death Penalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sarat A (2001) When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Zimring FE (2003) The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Carrie A. Rentschler, Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S., Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011; 296 pp.: 978-0822349495
Reviewed by: Steven Chermak, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mic higan, USA
As a criminal justice graduate student in the late 1980s, I had the opportunity to volunteer
at a victim advocacy organization. The organization was run by volunteers so I was able
to be involved in the core activities of the agency. I knew very little about the victims’
rights movement when I started and less about the impact that crime had on victims. The
idea of a second wound, second victimization, or retraumatization—that victims were
frequently harmed by criminal justice, social service and media personnel—was some-
thing I had given little thought to prior to my involvement in this organization as I was
primarily interested in the study of the administration of justice with a focus on policing.
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