Harvard University Press Blog

America's Death Penalty as Strange Social Fact

In Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, David Garland explains how capital punishment has persisted in the United States after being outlawed in all other Western nations. The endurance, he says, stems from the manner in which the American death penalty has come to bear the distinctive hallmarks of America’s political institutions and cultural conflicts. Below, Professor Garland outlines his anthropological approach to the topic and explains the implications of his book’s title. David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University.  Peculiar Institution is new this month.     

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When I talk to people about my book on capital punishment, the first thing they invariably ask is, “Is your book for it or against it?” The answer, I tell them, is neither. 

In its discussion of America’s death penalty, Peculiar Institution diverges from the familiar cultural script that shapes most of our conversation. Instead of treating capital punishment as a moral dilemma to be debated, a policy problem to be resolved, or a constitutional question to be settled, the book approaches the institution as a strange social fact that stands in need of explanation. 

Most books and articles engage the normative debate, arguing for or against the practice. This one steps back from the fray and tries to take a cool, clear-eyed look at an institution that causes more than its share of consternation and puzzlement. Instead of criticizing America’s 21st century death penalty or defending it against its critics, Peculiar Institution engages the task of explanation: Why do we have this institution? Why does it look the way it does? What functions does it perform for American society and the wider culture? In other words, I approach America’s contemporary system of capital punishment – and the prolix debates and discourses that swirl around it – with the sorts of questions and concepts that anthropologists bring to bear on the exotic cultural practices of a foreign society they are struggling to understand. 

The second thing my interlocutors invariably ask is: “Why is the book entitled Peculiar Institution?” After all, isn’t the death penalty a familiar American institution that everyone knows? What is “peculiar” about that? And occasionally someone will ask if “peculiar institution” isn’t the name that southerners used to give to the institution of racialized slavery and which Kenneth Stampp memorably described in his classic book of that name? 

Here is what I reply: 

Carol Padden wins MacArthur Fellowship

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just announced its list of 2010 MacArthur Fellows, who will each receive a “no strings attached” stipend of $500,000 over the next five years. We are proud to share the news that Sign Language Linguist Carol Padden is among the 23 winners of this so-called “Genius Award.” We have twice had the honor of publishing Dr. Padden’s work. In 1998 we published Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, considered a path-breaking transformation of the then-nascent field of deaf history. Inside Deaf Culture followed in 2004 and was hailed as a fascinating inside look at the development of group identity among deaf people. You can visit the MacArthur Foundation’s site for a video in which Dr. Padden describes her work. Below, Elizabeth Knoll, HUP Senior Editor for the Behavioral Sciences, Education, and Law, explains the importance of Dr. Padden’s research and also recalls her initial meeting with Dr. Padden and her husband, Tom Humphries. 

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Nobody single-handedly, or single-bookedly, creates social change. But sometimes there are books that see and say what others have seen and are still not quite able to say. Deaf in America and Inside Deaf Culture are two of those books. In them, Carol Padden and her co-author and husband Tom Humphries argued compellingly that the deaf were not pitiable victims of a physical deficiency, limited by a disability. They are the heirs and creators of an historically rich culture, of communities, schools, clubs, theatre, and art. To be Deaf is not just to be deaf. 

What has been even more influential is Padden and Humphries’s powerfully made case for American Sign Language—that it’s not simply an enormous set of gesticulations, as many hearing people might vaguely assume, but a language as grammatically structured and complex as any spoken language. That linguists now study ASL, and high schools offer courses in ASL along with Spanish and French, shows the impact of Padden and Humphries’s work. 

What I particularly admire about Carol is the skill—and energy!—with which she acts as a translator and intermediary between the Deaf and hearing world. The first time I met her and Tom, she made our three-way conversation possible by simultaneously translating everything I said orally into ASL for Tom, and everything Tom said in ASL into spoken English for me, and going back and forth herself between ASL for Tom and English for me. It was an amazing performance, and all the more amazing because I knew that this was essentially what she had been doing every single day, for her whole adult life. Her books are for both the Deaf and hearing worlds, and have changed them both.

Unpacking "The Shipment"

This weekend I trudged over to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art for a performance of "The Shipment," followed by a discussion with the cast and Young Jean Lee, the play’s writer and director.  "The Shipment" had its debut at the Wexner in Columbus nearly two years ago, moved on to New York for a run, and has since been touring, though this seems to have been its first Boston staging. Lee, who is Korean American, says she came to the project via her usual approach of asking herself what sort of play she would least want to have to write. The answer, this time, was a play about African American identity politics. And who could blame her? It’s a topic that is so delicate, and a project so inherently fraught, that I won’t even dare reach for a metaphor to describe the challenge. I’ll just say this: Young Jean Lee’s got chutzpah. 

"The Shipment" is a challenging piece. It’s essentially a variety show, featuring five African American actors juggling stereotypes and preying on perceptions. The opening number has two smiling, tuxedoed black men dancing to “Fascinating New Thing,” a pop song by the white-as-can-be Semisonic. The next section has a comedian in the Def Comedy Jam mold, profanely riffing on race and solidly stomping across the taste line for bits on incest and pedophilia, all while bemoaning the constraints of being a black man in comedy.  "The Shipment" proceeds from there, but the first two sections clearly outline the territory to be covered: with their echoes of blackface minstrelsy, the dancers and the comic prepare the audience for a discomforting evening of race on stage. 

Though "The Shipment" is a very smart play, its merits and achievements are entirely debatable – it feels like I’ve done nothing but debate them in the thirty-six hours since I saw it. The play is successful to the extent that it compels its audience members to critique their responses, and fails insofar as it lets them off the hook. To my eyes, too many people in the Boston museum crowd who’d blithely cackled during the play’s opening scenes were left without enough red on their faces when the houselights finally came back up. 

As a theatrical event, the meaning of what’s happening on stage during "The Shipment" is entirely inseparable from what’s happening in the seats. The play is not self-contained commentary on race in America, and it's not a document that asks us to reckon just with our national past. Presented for a predominantly white audience, in a country with its first black president, the staging of "The Shipment" this Saturday night was not simply about blackface minstrelsy – it was on top of it. The two exist entirely in palimpsest. 

Now, this blog is not often a space for theater reviews. But, throughout "The Shipment" and my processing of it, I’ve thought a lot about a brilliant book on blackface performance published by Harvard well before I came to town. In Raising Cain, W. T. Lhamon Jr. traces the evolving endurance of this sort of racial performance, “from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.” He brings back the concept of the “lore cycle,” which he’d developed in Deliberate Speed, his earlier text on American culture in the 1950s. To Lhamon, culture is transmitted through the cyclical repetition of practices, the passing down of these units of “lore.” Ideas, scenes, dance moves, motifs, and other layered memes are refitted through the years to match the changing circumstances, but the original meanings are never erased; rather, each new layer is merely compressed into the old, resulting in what Lhamon calls an “irresolvable compaction.” “What’s being transmitted is hardly any one thing,” Lhamon writes. “Culture transmits codes that are complex. People decode them differently.” 

It’s the latent meanings inevitably carried over that make a performance like "The Shipment" so risky to stage and so compelling to watch. If you’ve seen and appreciated "The Shipment," I recommend checking out Lhamon. If you’ve read Raising Cain but not seen the play, it’s worth trying. And if they’re both new to you, track down the DVD, swing by the bookstore or library, and block yourself out a challenging weekend.

"We do not know how many people have been wrongly convicted.": A Conversation with Brandon L. Garrett

Next Spring we’ll publish a book from Brandon L. Garrett, Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. In the book, Convicting the Innocent, Professor Garrett presents his systematic examination of the facts of the growing number of cases in which a person has been wrongfully convicted of a crime, only later to be exonerated through DNA testing. In forty of these cases, the accused had actually falsely confessed to the crime in question. After last week’s New York Times coverage of his Stanford Law Review article on false confessions, we invited Professor Garrett to discuss his work and the sweeping ramifications of DNA exoneration. 

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Q. How did you become interested in the topic of wrongful conviction? 

Before I became a law professor, and long before I thought I might write a book about wrongful convictions, I was a practicing civil rights lawyer. I worked for Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld – the founders of the Innocence Project, which pioneered the use of DNA testing to free innocent prisoners. 

One of my first cases as a rookie lawyer was that of a man named Eddie Lowery. He was a 22 year-old soldier who was in a minor traffic accident near the house of an elderly woman who had just been raped. Detectives brought him in and interrogated him over many hours. Ultimately he confessed, falsely, thinking that if he just parroted what they demanded that he say, he could finally go home. Instead, he was convicted by a jury and he spent ten years in prison. DNA testing eventually proved his innocence. Afterwards, I helped to file a civil case that resulted in a multi-million dollar settlement to compensate him for those years he lost. 

The opportunity to represent several people exonerated by DNA testing gave me an appreciation of the tragic consequences of wrongful convictions. I then began to wonder whether these were isolated accidents, or whether important lessons could be learned from exoneration cases. 

More than 250 innocent people have now been exonerated by DNA testing. I wanted to know what the jury had heard in these cases–what was the evidence used to convict so many innocent people? The only way to find out was to obtain the complete criminal trial transcripts. 

No one had conducted a trial study of that kind. I contacted defense lawyers, court clerks, court reporters, prosecutors, and innocence projects around the country. Over several years and with their generous help, I located documents ranging from confession statements to judicial opinions, and, most important, the transcripts of more than 200 exonerees’ original trials. That fascinating trial material is the subject of my book. 

Q. Why do you think that judges and many legal scholars believed, before the advent of DNA evidence, that false convictions were vanishingly rare? Today, why do people like Antonin Scalia (who cited a wrongful imprisonment rate of 0.027 for convicted felons) continue to believe that false conviction is rare? 

A famous example of the traditional attitude towards wrongful convictions was the comment by Judge Learned Hand that “the ghost of the innocent man convicted” is an “unreal dream” that we should ignore as a figment of our imagination. Judges did not typically entertain claims of innocence that prisoners brought years after a trial. Judges maintained that it was the jury’s job to decide the question of innocence. 

DNA exonerations changed the face of criminal justice by making it incontestably clear that wrongful convictions are a reality. DNA exonerations now occur with some frequency in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. Now that it is commonly used, DNA testing also clears thousands of suspects before they even reach trial. 

Yet the actual instances of DNA exoneration are just the tip of a much larger iceberg. One of the most haunting features of these exonerations is that so many were discovered by chance. Most convicts who seek post-conviction DNA testing cannot get it, typically because the evidence was destroyed after trial. Some jurisdictions still deny convicts access to DNA testing that could prove innocence. And DNA testing cannot be used in the vast bulk of criminal cases, which unlike rapes and murders do not usually involve biological evidence. 

Justice Scalia and others assume that our system works in every case where there has been no exoneration. Unfortunately, we cannot make that assumption. We have not examined those cases. We do not know how many people have been wrongly convicted. There is no reason to think that these 250 are the only ones. 

Multiple Multimedia Medium Wars

A comely young woman sits poolside, comfortably reading her new Kindle in the sun. To her right, some schlemiel in a t-shirt struggles with the awful glare on his iPad. She tells him her Kindle cost less than her sunglasses. Outclassed and inept, he flops his iPad limply. Foiled. Rats. 

That’s not how I spent my weekend. It’s Amazon’s new television commercial for the latest Kindle model. The ad has come in for a little teasing, but to me it’s the format, more than the content, that calls for a taking of stock. Where are we? How did we get here? Let’s look back. Let’s reduce. 

In the beginning there were books. Then television killed them. Then the internet killed television AND newspapers. Then the iPad killed everything. Or saved everything. And now the Kindle fights back! In the name of books. Or e-books. On television. An e-reader using television, which killed books, to show how much better it is for e-books than a tablet computer. But mostly just in the sun. 

This seems messy. And a little funny. But, really, maybe not so new. We’ve already seen a lot of these format fights, like last year’s Green Apple web series on the Book vs. the Kindle. 

But the media creep isn’t just for battles. By now you should be familiar with book trailers, which borrow from the movies to advertise books on the internet. Most of the book trailers out there yet are for novels, but just last week we shared a trailer made by the Harvard AIDS Initiative for Saturday Is for Funerals, a book we proudly published last spring. 

Today, though, we’re happy to share what’s surely a first for Harvard University Press. We’re not even sure what to call it. It’s not fan fiction, because it’s not fiction and Vic of Jane Austen’s World is so much more than a fan. Take a look: 

That's our Annotated Edition of Pride and Prejudice!  So, what to call this?  Third party plug? Outsider ad? We’ll think on it.  For now, though, just call us chuffed.   

    

The Science and the Personal Stories Behind the AIDS Epidemic in Africa

This past spring, we published a powerful and important new book on the AIDS crisis in Botswana. Co-written by Unity Dow, a novelist and the first woman Justice to serve on Botswana’s High Court, and Max Essex, Chair of the Harvard AIDS Initiative, Saturday Is for Funerals uniquely presents the heartbreaking personal stories of lives ravaged by the disease. But the book also describes the dramatic progress that Botswana has made in fighting the epidemic. Indeed, in the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that 85 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS. Now, ten years later, Dow and Essex explain why that won’t happen. 

In the following video, produced by the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative, Max Essex describes the book’s genesis. “I was looking for a book that explores both the science and the personal stories behind the AIDS epidemic in Africa,” he says. “That book didn’t exist. So I decided to fill that void.”

Dow and Essex discussed the book last May at the Harvard Book Store.  The WGBH Forum website has footage of the event.

Photo From the Field - Robert B. Stepto in Oak Bluffs

On August 25, Robert B. Stepto signed copies of his A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama at the Cousen Rose Gallery in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, for an interested crowd (which included Harvard luminary, television personality, and Image of the Black in Western Art coeditor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.-- that’s him in the blazer). 

A Home Elsewhere offers the first in-depth treatment of President Obama as a writer, and specifically as an African American writer whose work, most particularly the autobiographical Dreams from My Father, sits quite explicitly in conversation with the giants who came before him, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison.

Gates has said of the book: “No single work was more important in the revolution in close reading that electrified African American literary studies in the nineteen eighties than was Robert Burns Stepto's From Behind the Veil, a work as deeply insightful as it was engagingly written. Stepto reminded us, after Keats, that one dives into the lake not merely or necessarily to swim to the other side, but to enjoy the dive. Let us hope, at the end of another era of reductive thematic (race, class, gender) criticism, that this marvelous book can once again play that salutary role in redirecting readers to the sheer splendors of close reading, reminding us of the pleasures of luxuriating in the language of African American texts.”

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures upon which the book is based can be viewed here.

Market Mania and Collective Purpose

John Eklund represents Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, and Yale University Press across a great swath of the United States. Here, he gives his take on a few Harvard books coming this fall and his hope that they signal a growing public critique of the free market system. (You can view the original post at Paper Over Board, where John shares his “road reports and musings.”)

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One reason I love university presses is that, at their best, they serve as a kind of coal mine canary for big ideas. They combine extraordinary reserves of editorial patience with an exceptional level of academic brainpower. This makes the university press publishing process an incubation period for ideas that can later make their way into public discourse in a splashier way. 

Hundreds of popular books on evolution over the past couple decades owe their existence to the transformational research of E.O. Wilson and his book Sociobiology. 

Steven Pinker’s crisp, cogent arguments about cognition rely mightily on dozens of books nurtured over many years by the cognitive science masters at The MIT Press and other academic publishers. 

And the John Gray “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” industry rests on a foundation of academic scholarship, much of which originated with university press publishing. Interestingly, this fall Harvard will publish Rebecca Jordan-Young’s book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (September 2010), which calls into question twenty years of received wisdom on the alleged mars/venus gender divide. 

My point is that books published by university presses often signal trends. And this season I’m thrilled to see a cluster of fascinating titles examining our collective hallucination about the so-called free market system coming from Harvard University Press. If history is repeated, these books should presage a broader popular discussion about the system we live under and take for granted.

In a most straight-forward way, eminent Chicago scholar Bernard E. Harcourt takes on what he calls one of the most pernicious myths of the modern era- the idea that the market is self-regulating if left alone. In his sweeping new book The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment & the Myth of Natural Order (January 2011), Harcourt brilliantly links our irrational notions about punishment with our fantasies about the supposedly natural system of market organization. It’s a deeply subversive book in the best sense of the word.

Ten years ago, Harcourt launched a critique of the “broken windows” philosophy of urban law enforcement (the idea that if you harshly punish small property crimes, it will stop the big crimes) with his book Illusion of Order. That strategy had hypnotized policy-makers, and Harcourt’s thoughtful challenge opened a discussion. I’m hopeful that his new book will inspire a similar rethinking of our faith in the market metaphor. 

Defining Conflicts, Defining Ideas

I spent this Labor Day entangled in a series of conversations with the laboring academics in my life. We covered a lot of ground, almost all of which felt like it was moving under our feet as we spoke. We talked tenure. We talked tuition. We talked the glut of grad students and unemployed PhDs, the overreliance on adjuncts, and the effects of rapid university expansion. And we talked about what’s feeling like an increasingly frightening rhetorical attack on the professional/pensioned classes in this country. It’s a strange spot we’ve ended up in, where a common public enemy can be made of a tenured professor at a public university and an autoworker drawing the pension and healthcare that they spent a career earning.

Much of our conversation had been sparked by Christopher Shea's NYT Book Review essay on the growing backlash directed at academics, and what Shea sees as the expanding gulf between rich and poor institutions of higher learning. There’s clearly a conflict being framed here, and changes on the horizon. It’s easy enough to sit where I sit and say this, but a conjured cabal of do-nothing academics making six figures isn’t really the issue. Maybe the more important conflict is still the one between those who think that a liberal education in the humanities (the clear target through most of these debates) is a valuable thing, and those who think that it isn’t. 

For its tenth anniversary issue, The Chronicle Review asked scholars and illustrators to name “the defining idea” of the coming decade. Cambridge classicist and Harvard University Press author Mary Beard contributed an essay on this very debate. An excerpt: 

For all of us working in universities and particularly in the humanities (though not entirely—pure mathematicians face the same problem), the primary challenge of the next decade will be to explain why what we do is essential, not optional. We will need to put the case very clearly: A world in which no one has access to Homer or Dante in their original languages is a world that has lost more than the icing on the cake—but its very foundations. We will also need to explain that such studies can't simply be put on hold and picked up later when the money begins flowing again. By then, the tradition and the skills that uphold our knowledge will have died. (It would take a new Renaissance to get them back.) 

The full essay is available here, along with contributions from Jaron Lanier, Peter Singer, and more than a dozen others.

Solar Storms, Aurorae, and your Cell Phone

David Baker is the Chairman of the Physics Department at Austin College, and Todd Ratcliff is a planetary geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  They are the authors of The 50 Most Extreme Places in the Solar System, which Discover Magazine Online called an "extremely interesting book" from "two extremely fascinating gentlemen."  Below, Baker and Ratcliff explain the Northern Lights, solar activity, and why physicists know not to ditch their landlines.

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Have you had a chance recently to see the mystical Northern Lights dance across the sky? Now seems like a pretty good time to start looking!

"Why?", you ask? Well, the Sun has just begun emerging from the deepest "solar minimum'' in the past 100 years. As it climbs toward "solar maximum'', the activity of our Solar System's central star is on the rise, and with it the chances of more intense auroral displays.

The Sun bombards Earth's magnetic field with ionized gases of the solar wind plasma to create colorful aurorae. Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA)

Everyday, particles of the solar wind -- charged plasma flowing outward from the Sun -- bombard Earth's predominantly dipolar magnetic field. (Think about iron filings and a bar magnet to visualize a magnetic dipole). Ionized particles spiral toward the North and South Poles along the lines of Earth's magnetic field. Nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere are excited by the incoming plasma, and when the atoms return to their ground states, they release the extra energy as colorful bursts of green and red photons of light. Ionized nitrogen also emits brilliant blue flashes as it regains its missing electron. These ethereal flashes of light are the aurorae.