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Reaction to David Garland on capital punishment

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorEric Monkkonen
DOI10.1177/1462474505057114
Published date01 October 2005
Date01 October 2005
Subject MatterArticles
03_monkkonen_057114 (jk-t) 2/9/05 9:11 am Page 385
Copyright © SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
1462-4745; Vol 7(4): 385–387
DOI: 10.1177/1462474505057114
PUNISHMENT
& SOCIETY
Reaction to David
Garland on capital
punishment
ERIC MONKKONEN
University of California, USA
Cultural explanations are very often tautologies, but satisfying ones. Why is the USA
so violent? It is in the culture. Why do we execute? We are harsher than other similar
nations. This tautology runs roughshod over the 12 states and one territory that do not
execute: District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan,
Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin. And
it slights Connecticut, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, South Dakota
and the US military, which have not executed since 1976.1
Historical explanations of contemporary phenomena have a few more rules, so are
less slippery, but they too can take on the nature of tautology. Even the Constitution
can become part of a tautological explanatory framework. For instance, I am satisfied
that the 10th Amendment explains the highly fragmented and diverse law enforcement
system in the USA, but is that precise enough? In the late 18th century, major American
cities were corporate entities like their English counterparts, but by the 1830s and
1840s, they slipped into a form more like that of today, democratic public corporations.
Had the federal government paid attention to England’s Municipal Corporations Act,
cities might well have changed again. And law enforcement might have been regular-
ized, even loosely centralized. But probably few people cared, and the 10th ruled. Are
any police chiefs aware of this history of their fragmentation? Is bureaucratic inertia the
same as history?
David Garland critiques two important books – Franklin Zimring, The contradictions
of American capital punishment and James Q. Whitman, Harsh justice – which use
compelling historical and...

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