Capital punishment and American culture
| Author | David Garland |
| Date | 01 October 2005 |
| Published date | 01 October 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474505057097 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Capital punishment and
American culture
DAVID GARLAND
New York University, USA
INTRODUCTION
This is an essay about capital punishment and American culture. Its point of departure
is the recent publication of several books and articles suggesting that the USA’s reten-
tion of the death penalty is an expression of an underlying cultural tradition that creates
an elective affinity between American society and the execution of criminal offenders.
The implicit – and sometimes explicit – claim of this new literature is that today’s capital
punishment system is an instance of ‘American exceptionalism’, an expression of a deep
and abiding condition that has shaped the American nation from its formative years to
the present.
I want to take issue with this idea. I want to reject this culturalist version of American
exceptionalism and to resist the notion that there is something deep and abiding about
American culture that propels its judicial system towards capital punishment. In taking
issue with these specific propositions and the books in which they are developed, I
suggest an alternative way of understanding the continuation of capital punishment in
the USA after 1972. In the course of this discussion, I also raise some more general
issues about concepts of ‘culture’ and their use in the sociology of punishment.
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
Developments at home and abroad have recently given American capital punishment a
distinctiveness that it did not previously possess. It has become distinctive in that no
other western nation now retains capital punishment while in the USA, the death
penalty is still imposed and offenders are still put to death. With regard to executions,
the USA has been alone (among western nations) since 1977 when France executed
offenders for the last time. With regard to law, its singular status dates from 1981 when
the French Assembly abolished the penalty of judicial execution. Most western nations
had stopped executing offenders for ordinary crimes by the 1960s, though it took until
the 1990s for many of them to abolish it for special offences such as wartime offences
and crimes against the state.1
The sense of the USA’s distinctiveness increased in the 1990s. In a period when many
nations completely abolished the penalty, international conventions outlawed it2and
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474505057097
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Europe finally became a death penalty-free zone, the USA moved rapidly in the opposite
direction, increasing its annual number of executions (from one or two per year at the
start of the 1980s to a peak of 98 in 1999), passing new capital punishment legislation,
reducing the level of judicial review and regulation3and consolidating an increasingly
bipartisan political support for the institution.
So, the USA is now on its own. There are other democratic nations that are reten-
tionist: India, the world’s largest democracy, still executes offenders (though it does so
more rarely than the USA and most often as the punishment for political assassina-
tion).4And there are other advanced, fully developed industrialized nations that put
offenders to death – Japan is an example. But if the comparison set is ‘western nations’
then the USA stands alone.5
This state of affairs – in which the USA is an outlier, an egregious exception to an
established pattern – has recently prompted several scholars to invoke the sociological
theory of ‘American exceptionalism’ as an explanatory resource.6Tony Poveda (2000)
and Carol Steiker (2002) explicitly develop this claim in recent articles – the first assert-
ing it as part of a critique of the USA’s long history of using the death penalty in the
furtherance of race and class oppression, the second exploring the theme in a tentative
and non-committal way. Many other writers – e.g. Downes (2001), Braithwaite (2003)
and Feeley (2003) – invoke the idea casually, as if the assertion is self-evident and needs
no further argument. In 2003, two important books – one by Franklin E. Zimring and
the other by James Q. Whitman – developed the same thesis, more or less explicitly,
albeit with different claims about precisely what it is that marks American culture as
‘exceptional’ and how this culture gives rise to capital punishment.7
To invoke the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’ as a way of understanding the USA’s
retention of capital punishment is to say more than that the USA is now ‘on its own’.
The sociological language of ‘exceptionalism’ suggests that the USA’s current use of
capital punishment is no transient phase of penal policy but is, instead, anchored in a
kind of socio-cultural bedrock, a set of defining institutions and values that underlie
the American nation and shape its historical choices. And indeed, both Zimring and
Whitman make much of this embeddedness, suggesting that capital punishment is not
a judicial sanction that might be ended by act of law so much as a cultural disposition
that will persist until the American nation changes in some more fundamental way
(Whitman, 2003: 207; Zimring, 2003: 127).
The idea of American exceptionalism was first suggested by Tocqueville in the 1830s,
but it was given its modern meaning by sociologists like Sombart, Hartz and Lipset
who used it to explain the strength of ‘the liberal tradition’ and the weakness of working
class radicalism in the United States.8The theory is used today to explain distinctive
features of contemporary America by reference to the nation’s ‘organizing principles’,
especially its political and religious institutions which are taken to be ‘exceptional’ and
qualitatively different from those of other western nations.
What are the USA’s ‘exceptional’ characteristics? Lipset and Marks describe them as:
its relatively high level of social egalitarianism, economic productivity, and social mobility .. .,
alongside the strength of religion, the weakness of the central state, the earlier timing of elec-
toral democracy, ethnic and racial diversity, and the absence of feudal remnants, especially fixed
social classes. (2000: 16)
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