David Garland, 'Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition': Review

Abstract

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”.