race

Several abortion providers have come under intense criticism for offering free abortions to women affected by Hurricane Harvey. While this criticism echoes decades of social and political debates regarding women’s reproductive rights, the control over women’s bodies extends far beyond the second-wave feminist movement during the mid-20th century. For example, recent calls for the removal of a statue honoring J. Marion Sims, a doctor known for medical contributions to the field of gynecology and who performed experimental surgeries on non-consenting enslaved black women without anesthesia, illustrate the historical links between reproductive control, gender, and race. Sociologists allow us to trace the long history of controlling black women’s reproduction.

While historical accounts of reproductive rights rhetoric in the 19th century point to the gendered issue of men’s control over women’s bodies and the valorization of traditional motherhood, they neglect how political rhetoric also drew on ideas of white superiority. As more immigrants migrated to the U.S., Anglo-Saxon political elites worried that greater migrant representation would quickly dismantle their political power, and so American physicians encouraged Anglo-Saxon women to bear children for the sake of continued political power among whites.

• Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay. 2004. “Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America.” American Sociological Review 69(4): 498-518.

Even though white women were subjected to political rhetoric that sought to control their reproduction, their capacity to reproduce the white race meant they were privileged relative to black women. This privilege was shaken when white women gave birth to mixed-race children, however, and these women were sometimes forced into indentured servitude. On the other hand, racially mixed children born to black women during slavery were not threatening to a white racial order. Instead, they were viewed as symbols of white men’s social and economic control over black women.

• Abby Ferber. 1999. “Planting the Seed: The Invention of Race.” in White Man Falling: Race, Gender & White Supremacy. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Aida Hurtado. 1989. “Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color.” Signs 14(4).

During and after slavery, black women were commonly depicted as sexually deviant, hypersexual and promiscuous. State-sanctioned practices to control black women’s reproduction–like coercive birth control and mass sterilization campaigns where doctors performed hysterectomies on black women that were not medically necessary–reflected these cultural images. When black women did have children, restrictive welfare policies limited the state support they could receive, further drawing on racialized constructions of black women as lazy, ignorant, “welfare queens.” Both sets of state practices reflect the attempt to control black women’s sexuality, reproduction, and families.

• Patricia Hill Collins. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge.
• Dorothy Roberts. 1998. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage.

For more on the ways mothers are controlled and policed, check out this TROT on morality and maybe-moms.

Many of us can recall at least a few teachers who influenced our career interests. At the same time, contentious relationships with educators may discourage class participation and extracurricular involvement. Social scientists of education provide important insight into how teachers and school administrators’ perceptions and disciplinary actions often stem from race, class, and gender stereotypes. They find that these early educational challenges may widen social inequalities later in life.

Several studies suggest that white teachers often view black students less favorably than their white students. These negative perceptions result in lower grades and student evaluation scores for minority youth. Non-white teachers, however, are less likely to hold more negative views towards minority students. But not all minority students are viewed less favorably. One study indicated that teachers’ perceptions regarding Hispanic students were similar to those of white students, while many teachers reported more favorable views of Asian students than white students.

• Douglas B. Downey and Shana Pribesh. 2004. “When Race Matters: Teachers’ Evaluations of Students’ Classroom Behavior.” Sociology of Education 77(4): 267-282.
• Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Maxine S. Thompson. 1987. “School Performance, Status Relations, and the Structure of Sentiment: Bringing the Teacher Back In.” American Sociological Review 52: 665-82.
• Patrick B. McGrady and John R. Reynolds. 2013. “Racial Mismatch in the Classroom: Beyond Black-white Differences.” Sociology of Education 86(1): 3-17.

Teachers’ perceptions also rely on cultural beliefs of female intellectual inferiority, especially in mathematical subjects. Minority boys and girls are overrepresented in lower level math courses and are more likely to obtain lower test scores than their white peers, which partially explains teacher differences in student perceptions. Yet, even when considering GPA and test scores, “high school math teachers are less likely to judge white females as being in a class that is too easy for them” (312). White boys are then perceived as the group to which all others – white girls, minority boys, and minority girls – are compared.

• Catherine Riegle-Crumb and Melissa Humphries. 2012. “Exploring Bias in Math Teachers’ Perceptions of Students’ Ability by Gender and Race/Ethnicity.” Gender & Society 26(2): 290-322.

Negative views of students also affect school disciplinary actions. Though many schools espouse the idea of helping ‘at-risk’ youth, organizational policies and practices may actually push students out of school. Observations from one high school suggest that teachers construct images of “troublemakers” based not only upon the student’s behavior, but also their prior academic performance (e.g. grades, truancy record, status on the honor roll). Thus, administrators and teachers were less likely to view students who maintained higher academic performance but misbehaved as “troublemakers.” These images, however, vary across gender and race. Teachers and school administrators often punish Black girls more than white girls through referrals, suspension, and expulsion for exhibiting what they deem as loud, disruptive, and aggressive behavior. In other words, behavior that fails to conform to traditional norms of femininity.

• Christine Bowditch. 1993. “Getting Rid of Troublemakers: High School Disciplinary Procedures and the Production of Dropouts.” Social Problems 40(4): 493—509.
• Monique W. Morris. 2015. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. New York: The New Press.
• Edward W. Morris and Brea L. Perry. 2017. “Girls Behaving Badly? Race, Gender, and Subjective Evaluation in the Discipline of African American Girls.” Sociology of  Education 90(2): 127-148.

“They use their media to assassinate real news…all to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism, and sexism, and xenophobia, and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding, until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.”

Last month, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch spoke these words in a new video campaign targeting progressive political protesters. The ad features black and white media footage of protest signs with the words “RESIST” and shows protesters looting, breaking windows, and starting fires in the street. Loesch and the NRA have since received widespread criticism for the advertisement’s seemingly pro-violence rhetoric, even evoking a video response from BlackLivesMatter. While the NRA maintains that the advertisement is not intended to encourage violence against progressive political protest, the black and white imagery depicting protesters as criminals is eerily reminiscent of political campaigns (e.g. the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s) that used political action as a call for criminalization and law and order.

In times of spiraling economic instability, political divisiveness, and social inequality — such as the Great Depression or the Civil Rights Movement, the result is often public unrest and widespread protest. In order to quell state criticisms, elite political actors on both sides of the political spectrum develop campaigns that heighten public anxiety of crime by conflating political dissent with criminal activity. President Nixon, for example, ran on a campaign of “law and order” and called himself part of the “silent majority” on this issue. Regardless of actual fluctuations in crime rates, the public often accepts these messages of criminalization and tough on crime policies. This law and order rhetoric then legitimizes police and military aggressive surveillance – and at times, physical confrontation – against protesters.

• David Garland. Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Katherine Beckett. 1997. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Marie Gottschalk. 2015. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Craig Jenkins, David Jacobs, and Jon Agnone. 2003. “Political Opportunities and African‐American Protest, 1948–1997.” American Journal of Sociology 109(2): 277-303.

We can link the current tide of mass incarceration to these types of campaigns in the 1960s and ’70s. Though the Johnson administration is lauded for taking important legislative steps in welfare reform, Elizabeth Hinton’s recent work argues that the administration simultaneously developed legislation, like the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA), that expanded police control through federal funding and toughened criminal sanctions amid a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and marches by (young) black advocates against Jim Crow practices. The Johnson administration helped create the “War on Crime,” and their political rhetoric rested upon the notions of black urban pathology and individual (as opposed to structural) economic failure.

• Elizabeth Hinton. 2016. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

While social scientists have long talked about globalization, a new concept called “glocalization” has emerged as a way to highlight the ways that global patterns are accepted and interpreted by localized populations. Sport sociologists have been among the leaders in developing this concept, and the International Champions Cup (ICC), a soccer tournament making its way around the United States, helps illustrate and explain why.

By combining local customs and traditions with global trends, communities engaged in globalization have control over how the global viewpoint is digested. And this combination of the outside world with the inside world has become a highly effective tool of capitalism — jumping on recognized trends while providing a local twist makes glocalizing of certain products more appealing.

• George Ritzer. 2003. “Rethinking Globalization: Glocalization/Grobalization and Something/Nothing*.” Sociological Theory 21(3): 193-209.

When it comes to the ICC, we see American promoters and communities taking the world’s most popular sport and infusing it with traditional American sporting values. Club chants have been replaced by pop music that plays over the sound system like at many basketball and baseball games. Marching to the stadium with team banners and flags is replaced by exclusive fan party zones during tailgating. And players are elevated to celebrity status rather than community heroes.

• Barry Smart. 2007. “Not Playing Around: Global Capitalism, Modern Sport and Consumer Culture.” Global Networks 7(2): 113-134.
• Richard Giulianotti and Roland Robertson. 2007. “Recovering the Social: Globalization, Football and Transnationalism.” Global Networks 7(2): 166-186.

Glocalization,  however, comes at the risk of loosing those who support what is already established. The ICC, for example, has created an artificial experience for hardcore fans  because of the domination of casual fans — known as “post fans” — as the main spectator group.  Post fans are casual supporters who have a certain expectation of what the event is supposed to entail, and often the experience they seek is very homogeneous with every other Western, middle class sporting experience.  With the event being catered to post fans, hardcore soccer fanatics are left with a watered down experience.  And within the context of the United States, Hispanics, Africans and other minority and immigrant groups are the primary soccer supporters. However, these groups are often at an economic disadvantage, which makes attending these games very difficult, further strengthening the post fan’s position in the glocalizing of the the global product of soccer.

• John Urry. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE Publications.
• Richard Giulianotti. 1999. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Another U.S. Independence Day came and went, along with cheers of ‘Murcia! and sentimental Facebook posts about American pride. But how do racial and ethnic minorities experience being “American” while systemic racial oppression continues to target people of color in the U.S.? A lot of the focus has been on the experiences of Black Americans, but social science shows that other racial minorities are similarly marginalized when they are excluded from whiteness.

For example, while stereotypes like the “model minority” myth seemingly valorize Asian American achievement, other stereotypes exclude them from the “American” label by depicting them as foreign. Moreover, Asian Americans are a pan-ethnic group – meaning there are many nationalities included under the umbrella term “Asian American.”  And darker-skinned, poorer Asians, like Cambodian refugees, are excluded from characterizations of excellence and success.

• Claire Jean Kim. 1999. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society 27(1):105–38.
• Aihwa Ong. 2003. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Even though many Arab Americans have lighter skin, enjoy middle class success, and identify as White, they are still “not quite White” because of the ways they are racialized. Negative stereotypes about Arab people as “backward” and “uncivilized” have resurfaced in recent years as the racialization of Arab and Muslim men as criminals and threats to national security became mainstream talking points in the War on Terror.

• Saher Selod and David G. Embrick. 2013. “Racialization and Muslims: Situating the Muslim Experience in Race Scholarship.” Sociology Compass 7(8):644–55.
• Sarah M. A. Gualtieri. 2009. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Institutions may also dismiss important differences among various Black ethnic groups. For Somalis who come to America, it is often the first time they are considered Black. However, their religion, language, and cultural identities may be more salient, differentiating them as “foreign” from Black Americans.

• Abdi M. Kusow. 2006. “Migration and Racial Formations Among Somali Immigrants in North America.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32(3):533–51.

Amy Bach, a lawyer and criminal justice journalist, built a free public tool titled “Measures for Justice” that contains data on over 300 county court systems in 6 states. The nonprofit has received funding from the burgeoning activism of the tech community — Google gave Measures for Justice a grant for $1.5 million dollars and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative recently announced they would be awarding the nonprofit $6.5 million. Due to the fragmented nature of the criminal justice system, the Measures for Justice research team frequently had to travel to individual counties in order to request records.

Sociologists who study punishment have long recognized the importance of geography in structuring disadvantage, at multiple levels. For instance, there are tremendous differences between states in the scope and impact of felon voting restrictions. Florida, for instance, contains 27% of all disenfranchised felons in the United States—in large part due to its policy of disenfranchising people after they have completed their sentences.. On the other end of the spectrum, Vermont and Maine allow even prisoners to vote.  Another way that geography structures punishment is through children’s experiences of parental incarceration, which varies substantially by region. Moreover, the extent of racial disparity also varies regionally, with African American children experiencing the highest risks in all regions, and Latinos experiencing the most disadvantage in the West and Northeast.   

• Christopher Muller and Christopher Wildeman. 2016. “Geographic Variation in the Cumulative Risk of Imprisonment and Parental Imprisonment in the United States.” Demography 53(5): 1499-1509.
• Chris Uggen, Ryan Larson, and Sarah Shannon. 2016. “6 Million Lost Voters: State-level Estimates of Felony Disenfranchisement.” The Sentencing Project.

In a similar vein, even new forms of cybercrime are structured by geography. Sociologists have recently started to explore how these new types of crimes, such as cyber-victimization, are shaped by state-level characteristics.

• Hyojong Song, Michael Lynch, and John Cochran. 2016. “A Macro-Social Exploratory Analysis of the Rate of Interstate Cyber-Victimization.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 41(3): 583-601.

These efforts could prove useful for scholars and for the public. For example, Measures for Justice developed a “Fair Process” indicator, which is closely tied to the social science concept of procedural justice — the idea that citizens will be more likely to comply with the law and requests of law enforcement if they perceive the system as fair. Recently, reforms and police training based on procedural justice have begun to be widely implemented.

• Daniel Nagin and Cody Telep. 2017. “Procedural Justice and Legal Compliance.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science.
• John Hagan and Valerie Hans. 2017. “Procedural Justice Theory and Public Policy: An Exchange.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

Veronica Horowitz is a Ph.D Candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies punishment, mercy, and gender in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Last month, a Texas law enforcement officer opened fire on a van of several Black teenage boys, killing 15-year-old Jordan Edwards. His death reminded many of the cell phone footage showing a Los Angeles off-duty white officer dragging a 13-year-old Latino boy by the collar while pointing a gun, or the McKinney, TX officer who drew his gun on multiple Black youth at a pool party in 2015. During media coverage of Edwards’ death, the media emphasized his honor roll status and the fact that he was a “good student,” and thus not deserving of this treatment. This is not always the way mistreatment of minority youth is framed, however, and sociological research on youth victimization finds that minority youth are often excluded from the category of “true” or “ideal” victimhood, which ultimately works to legitimize their victimization.

Societal notions of childhood characterize children as innocent and pure in contrast to the deviant adult world. Society employs these images of innocence to address children’s vulnerability to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. However, when children’s behaviors contradict traditional notions of innocence and purity, adults tend to exclude them from the social and legal protection that childhood often affords. 

• Suzanne Shanahan. 2007. “Lost and Found: The Sociological Ambivalence Toward Childhood.” Annual Review of Sociology 33: 407-28.
• Nick Lee. 2001. Childhood and Society: Growing up in an Age of Uncertainty. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

This inclusion and exclusion of some children from social and legal protection is highly racialized. Images of childhood innocence and victimization typically feature mainstream images of white girls and boys, leaving minority children excluded. Not only that, schools and law enforcement view Black and Latino boys as dangerous and often ignore or downplay their everyday experiences of violence.

• Victor Rios. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press.
• Jenny Kitzinger. 1997. “Who are You Kidding? Children, Power, and the Struggle Against Sexual Abuse.” Edited by James and Prout in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood.

Despite encountering high levels of street and interpersonal violence, Black and Latina girls’ victimization remains largely neglected in comparison to their white female peers. Minority girls living in high crime environments often feel pressure from adults to adhere to notions of being “good girls.” Yet, to survive such environments, many minority girls feel they must forgo traditional feminine roles and engage in physical confrontations with other girls and/or men. In doing so, they are criminalized, depicted as bad girls and “ghetto chicks,” and excluded from societal ideals of victimhood.

• Nikki Jones. 2010. Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Meda Chesney Lind and Michele Eliason. 2006. “From Invisible to Incorrigible: The Demonization of Marginalized Women and Girls.” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 2(1): 29-47.

Sex education is a contentious subject in U.S. politics. Before Obama’s presidency, the federal government only funded abstinence education, but in 2009 Obama created the Office of Adolescent Health and diverted some of these funds to create an approved list of practices shown to prevent teen pregnancy (several sources show abstinence-only education does not) through research. With Trump as president, the future of sex ed is an open question, but sociologists can offer some insight regarding what we already know.

Public sex education or “social hygiene” appeared in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century in response to concerns about increasing urbanization and growing sexual temptations. During the 1960s and 70s, sexual cultures in the U.S. underwent further shifts, influenced by feminism, youth culture, and the gay rights movement. However, anxieties about sex, especially for youth in the U.S., remained. Debates about what kind of sex education to provide for youth seemed to occur between two poles — sexual liberals who supported a comprehensive sex education in schools and sexual conservatives who supported abstinence-only education. 

• Jeffrey Moran. 2000. Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Kristin Luker. 2007. When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex–and Sex Education–Since the Sixties. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Janice Irvine. 2004. Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

No matter which type of sex education is implemented, sex ed is ultimately about regulating youth sexuality. Political actors and popular conversations alike frame youth sex as a social problem that requires intervention. Much of this discourse focuses on sex as a danger for children and young adults. Thus, sex education in the U.S. draws on an assumption of risk, relying on prevention-based education.

• Jessica Fields. 2012. “Sexuality Education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas across a Political Divide.” Sociology Compass 6(1): 1–14.

However, sex educators and the curriculum they use do not assume all children are equally innocent or at risk. Scholars show that sex education often draws on racial stereotypes of youth of color as sexually deviant. Youth of color are “adultified” and thus perceived as more sexual than their white peers. For instance, teachers often characterize African American girls as sexually opportunistic and assume Latina teens are inherently at risk of teen pregnancy. Further, boys are assumed to be sexually aggressive, and girls are held responsible for dealing with boys’ desires.

• Jessica Fields. 2008. Risky Lessons Sex Education and Social Inequality. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Lorena García. 2009. “‘Now Why Do You Want to Know about That?’ Heteronormativity, Sexism, and Racism in the Sexual (Mis)education of Latina Youth.” Gender & Society 23(4): 520–41.

Public outrage about missing Black and Latina girls struck the nation’s capital in March, with many calling the number of missing girls of color a crisis. While the number of disappearances has not risen considerably in recent years, and there weren’t actually 14 Black girls missing in 24 hours in DC, the question is an important one for sociological analysis. Who is considered a “victim” of violent crime and whose victimization goes unnoticed?  

Whites, particularly white women, are the most likely to be framed as victims of crime. Take laws named after victims in the U.S. (e.g., Megan’s law) — while Blacks suffer far more victimization from violent crime than whites, of the 51 laws named after victims in the U.S. from 1990-2016, 86.3% are named after white victims. Only four are named after Black victims, and three after Hispanic victims. Additionally, 65% of these laws were named after female victims.

• Teresa C. Kulig and Francis T. Cullen. 2016. Where is Latisha’s Law? Black Invisibility in the Social Construction of Victimhood. Justice Quarterly: 1-36.

The construction of whites as victims and Blacks as offenders extends to the reaction of law enforcement when girls are reported as runaways. Scholars argue that running away from home is particularly gendered, pointing to the high number of girls that run away compared to boys and their reasons for running away. Of girls that were considered runaways in the U.S. from 1997-2003, Black and Hispanic girls were significantly more likely to have a runaway charge than white girls. White girls were more likely to get off with a warning.

• Kimberly Kempf-Leonard and Pernilla Johansson. 2007. Gender and Runaways: Risk Factors, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice Experiences. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 5(3): 308-327.

Similarly, Black girls are more likely to be punished in schools. A recent study showed that Black girls are three times more likely than white girls to get an office referral, a higher likelihood than white boys in the same school. Black girls also got referrals for more ambiguous infractions like dress code violations or disobedience.

• Edward W. Morris and Brea L. Perry. 2017. Girls Behaving Badly? Race, Gender, and Subjective Evaluation in the Discipline of African American Girls. Sociology of Education 90(2): 127-148.

What does all of this mean in the context of missing Black girls? It means that institutions, like schools and law enforcement, are far more likely to criminalize Black girls than their white counterparts, which means that they are less likely to see them as victims.

With Arkansas’ recent attempts to execute seven inmates in the course of eleven days, and the Supreme Court’s upcoming oral arguments surrounding McWilliams v. Dunn , there has been a lot news about the death penalty this month. Although it is abolished in many other industrialized nations, 31 U.S. states still retain the death penalty, and there is extensive research on this “peculiar institution” and why it remains resilient today.

Despite a multitude of studies, current research remains inconclusive on the deterrent effects of capital punishment. These ambiguous findings are due to a lack of attention to “noncapital sanctions” for homicide like life sentences and incomplete data on potential murderers’ perceptions of capital punishment. What is clear is that there is an extreme racial divide in support for the death penalty, with Black Americans being consistently less likely to support capital punishment than whites. This divide is partly attributed to racial prejudice against Blacks, so much so that one study suggests that if you exclude whites with extreme racial attitudes, support for capital punishment between Black and white Americans is not nearly as bifurcated. Death sentences are also applied disparately across racial lines, with defendants convicted of killing white females most likely to receive a capital punishment sentence, while those convicted of killing Black males are afforded more leniency.

• Lawrence D. Bobo & Devon Johnson. 2004. “A Taste for Punishment: Black and White Americans’ Views on the Death Penalty and the War on Drugs.“ Du Bois Review 1(1): 151-180.
• Jefferson E. Holcomb, Marian R. Williams, & Stephen Demuth. 2004. “White Female Victims and Death Penalty Disparity Research.“ Justice Quarterly 21(4): 877-902.
• Marrian R. Williams, Stephen Demuth & Jefferson E.Holcomb. 2007. “Understanding the Influence of Victim Gender in Death Penalty Cases: the Importance of Victim Race, Sex‐related Victimization, and Jury Decision Making.“ Criminology 45(4): 865-891.
• James D. Unnever & Francis T. Cullen. 2007. “The Racial Divide in Support for the Death Penalty: Does White Racism Matter?” Social Forces 85(3): 1281-1301.
• National Research Council. 2012. Deterrence and the Death Penalty. National Academies Press.

Scholars argue that the death penalty is nested within an exceptionally punitive American carceral state. Capital punishment stems from an unparalleled American political culture that centralizes issues of crime and the criminal justice system. Unlike their European counterparts, American judges and prosecutors are locally elected, allowing much of the criminal justice process to be subject to electoral cycles and public outcries. This political structure, combined with a history of racial conflict and segregation, perpetuates low levels of social solidarity and an underdeveloped state, which allows retributive punishments to flourish. This is especially evident in the American South, a region that has a long history of collective, racialized violence and where death penalty support is particularly embedded.

• David Garland. 2010. Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Harvard University Press.
• Marie Gottschalk. 2014. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton University Press.