BOOKS

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

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 social 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: Legislative Intent, Policing, and Racism in the Criminal Legal System.

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

Under Advanced Contract with the University of Chicago Press. Submitted for Peer Review, December 2025.

Working as Intended: Race, Class, Gender and the Law. A book-length analysis linking observed racial disparities in millions of North Carolina arrest records from 2013 through 2019 with the intent of the legislature during the period when relevant laws were passed, using comprehensive data from the North Carolina courts system. Under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press; submitted for peer review December 2025.

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.