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.
| Author | Sarah Armstrong |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0066 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Pages | 490-492 |
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...
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