BOOKS

THE MAKING OF A PUNITIVE STATE: Punishment and Social Control in the United States.

Kaneesha Johnson.

In Progress.

My book project, The Making of a Punitive State, seeks to challenge the assumption that punishment is primarily a function of the prison and police state and show how the use of punishment and social control was, and remains, a central feature of a multitude of government public welfare services across the United States. I use a mixed method approach, including archival research and quantitative methods, to study the history and development of punitive institutions and policies.

This book project is based on my Ph.D. dissertation, which won the Robert Noxon Toppan prize for the best dissertation upon a subject of political science from the Department of Government at Harvard University in May 2023 and received an honorable mention from the APSA Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section.

WORKING AS INTENDED: What Archives and Data Tell us About the Legacy of Racism in the Law.

Frank R. Baumgartner, Marty A. Davidson, and Kaneesha Johnson.

Currently in production and scheduled to be published by the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2027.

No one could claim to be surprised by racial disparities in the American criminal legal system; these have been staring us in the face for hundreds of years. In this book, we show how these disparities reflect a system working exactly as designed, not a flaw, an unintended consequence, or an anomaly that will soon disappear. Our approach is two-fold: a comprehensive analysis of over 13 million arrest records in a single state, and a deep dive into the historical archives associated with particular elements of the criminal code. Geographic patterns of police surveillance and arrest correspond today with historical patterns of redlining from the 1930s. Those areas deemed “least desirable” back then continue to have the highest arrest rates today. Major areas of the law, such as the traffic code, drug laws, capital punishment, gang laws, “habitual offenders”, and laws relating to public protests were specifically designed to ensnare and control African-Americans, and many of these laws still on the books were passed during historical periods when Jim Crow was the law of the land. Far from isolated incidents, these and other laws enacted with racially discriminatory intent continue to affect millions of Americans today. The racial disparities that are ubiquitous throughout the criminal legal system therefore reflect a system working as intended.

DEADLY JUSTICE: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty. Oxford University Press. 2018.

Frank R. Baumgartner, Marty Davidson, Kaneesha R. Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin P. Wilson.

Deadly Justice is a comprehensive examination of the record established through 40 years of experience with the death penalty. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all existing death penalty laws in its landmark Furman v. Georgia (1972) decision. The Court was particularly concerned about the arbitrary and capricious administration of the penalty. Four years later in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) the Court approved a system with special guidelines to reduce or eliminate the problems earlier identified.

With chapters focusing on homicides, race and gender dynamics, aggravators and mitigators, geography, reversals, delays on death row, exonerations, methods of execution and botches, last-minute stays of execution, mental illness, public opinion, cost, deterrence, and evolving standards, the book offers a comprehensive overview of our nation’s modern experiment with capital punishment. At a time when other countries have abandoned judicial execution, the U.S. attempted to fix its own deeply flawed system.

The book’s empirical focus provides hard statistical evidence that not only has the modern system retained the vast majority of the issues that concerned the Justices in Furman, but several new problems have arisen as well: cost, botched lethal injections, decades of delay, geographic concentration in just a few jurisdictions, enormous rates of reversal, and last minute stays of execution. Thus, if anything, the modern death penalty not only fails the Furman test, but it scores even worse than the historical death penalty which was declared unconstitutional in 1972. Efforts to repair the system have failed.