Weekly Reading (5/23-5/27)

Peculiar Institution America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition

David Garland provides a multitude of teaching topics from his book, Peculiar Institution. One aspect of the book that is especially useful in the classroom is its dissection of the American governmental system and its direct comparison to the governments of Europe. A key feature in this lies in what Garland says about the American legislature and the judicial process. He focuses on the localization of American politics and how they are in contrast to a more centralized, top down approach that occurs in Europe. Not only does this partially explain the existence of the death penalty in American, but it also provides students with idea of how our system operates and how it differs from other governments’ systems. Garland takes time to dwell on this point to show his readers how our judicial system can be quite cumbersome, drawn out, and overwhelming with all its processes of appeals. Furthermore Garland displays how localized politics sways the national politics not only in the judicial branch, but also in the legislature. He uses the death penalty to explain this complex idea in a simplified way, and in a way that students could definitely understand and begin to analyze. Students today might not understand the intricate complexities of the American judicial and legislative bodies, but this book streamlines these notions with a compelling story of the death penalty that is at once both interesting and comprehensible.

As for the questions of the week I would like to focus on the following: Should we consider there to be a relationship between education and crime, and if so, should we consider allocating more money into education with the hopes of deterring future crime? I argued that we should do this during the discussion, which seemed to bring up many nuances of the educated criminal or serial killer, like Ted Bundy. I think this is missing the overall picture. When framing this question I do not think of these exceptions to the rule, the cases where someone who is educated premeditates murder as in the case of a serial killer or a two people get carried away with the end result being death. I think about the greater majority of crimes in a America, like robberies. It’s these cases of a smaller crime gone wrong, with the end result being the loss of an innocent life as is the case when a police officer is shot in the field that we need to focus on. This type of incidence in my mind could be greatly curtailed if education had more funding, which if used correctly could reach a greater amount of individuals and not only students, but also adults who think they have no other option than to turn to a life of crime. Education can remedy this by teaching concepts, ideas, and skills to a wide variety of people. Education does have the power to deter crime, it just depends are how we as a society are going to distribute it.