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

Morality Framing in U.S. Drug Control Policy: An Example From Marijuana Decriminalization

“…Backlash is another important aspect of the politics of morality policy. Garland () argues that the Supreme Court's intervention on the death penalty issue in the early 1970s—coming at a time of heightened racial politics, rising violent crime, and Southern embrace of conventional religious and cultural values (Christian evangelical or fundamentalist faith and observance as well as support for states' rights and the “traditional” family)—sparked a transformative backlash. Subsequently, he contends, the death penalty “ceased to be a matter of penal policy and became instead a symbolic battlefield” (Garland, , p. 253).…”

Penality and the Penal State

“…This research is comparative as well as historical and state‐by‐state variation over time within the United States proves to be as revealing as historical comparisons between the United States and other nations. In Peculiar Institution (Garland, ), I argued that the explanation for America's continued use of capital punishment lies, above all, in the distinctive character of the American state and the radically local, popular majoritarian control of the power to punish. What I am now proposing is a similarly state‐centered, comparative inquiry into the distinctive characteristics of American penality more generally.…”

“…The contextual frame in which a specific penal policy exists cannot be known in advance of detailed historical and sociological analysis. That penality's policy context and social function varies from place to place and time to time is an established finding in the sociology of punishment and is demonstrated clearly, for example, in the changing role of capital punishment (Garland, ). Before settling on an analytical frame, therefore, one needs a sense of how penal power is deployed in the specific jurisdictions under study.…”

“…Much of the problem lies in the necessarily inexact ways in which each of 190 or more nations is reduced to a few dozen variables: a process that inevitably means that each “factor” masks a great deal of internal variation. So although we know that small differences in the institutionalization of democratic principles can have large penological implications (Barker, ; Garland, ), it is difficult to capture these subtleties while keeping large‐scale studies manageable. In these circumstances, we should encourage more detailed, in‐depth comparisons focused not on large numbers of nations but instead on a few comparable jurisdictions selected for their relevance to issues of theoretical importance…”

“…See Mauer () and Garland (). Data on prisoners before 1990 bundle White and Hispanic prisoners together.…”