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Capital Punishment & American Culture
by David Garland
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 retention 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.
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thanks Diederik
Posted by Cieciel at December 14, 2005 08:55 AM