David Garland, PECULIAR INSTITUTION: AMERICA'S DEATH PENALTY IN AN AGE OF ABOLITION New York: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2010. 417 pp. ISBN 9780199594993. £21.99.
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0066 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Pages | 490-492 |
| Author | Sarah Armstrong |
The book's title signals clearly its argument. “Peculiar institution” is of course a reference to America's enslavement of blacks, and applied here to the death penalty links this legacy of racial domination to contemporary penal practice. The subtitle further clarifies Garland's stance: the persistence of capital punishment in America during a (European and Western) “age of abolition”. “Why”, he asks, “did the processes of transformation that fully abolished the death penalty throughout the rest of the Western world not do so in America?” (184).
The book's aim is to answer this question by developing “a detailed description of death penalty practices and an explanatory account of their sources, uses, and meanings” (15). Such a plan of analysis might seem straightforward but in this field, where the literature is dominated by those pushing an agenda either supporting or opposing its use, it is actually quite ambitious. To accomplish it requires stepping outside the debates of morality and principle and turning attention to “the complex field of institutional arrangements, social practices and and cultural forms through which American death penalties are actually administered” (14). Garland is particularly interested in how the death penalty, and its technological refinement and patterns of use over time, reflects an American sensibility and identity. A core feature of this sensibility is diversity and contradiction, an internal tension and resistance to the very notion of one America, that Garland is right to emphasise. He points to the widely varying positions different states take with regard to capital punishment. Michigan abolished it in the mid-nineteenth century well before the most progressive nations of Europe, while other states have retained the death penalty on the books but rarely or never apply it. Meanwhile, the face of the American death penalty to the world is probably a place like Texas, which has executed nearly 450 people since 1976 (the year when legal executions resumed following a US Supreme Court ruling that rendered many death penalty statutes unconstitutional).
This diversity and contradiction in death penalty practice flourishes due to a number of cultural, social and institutional conditions prevailing in America. Racial discrimination is among these, and thrives due to the enabling but less well publicised factor of localism. Death penalty prosecution decisions are largely made at the level of the local community (i.e. by...
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