ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses capital punishment as an issue in the sociology of social control. Using the facts of historical and geographical variation in the use of death penalties, it seeks to explain why capital punishment has largely disappeared in the West and why the USA remains an important exception to that pattern. The chapter examines questions of institutional design and uses form as a guide to function. America's capital punishment complex is defined as the whole set of discursive and non-discursive practices through which capital punishment is enacted, evoked and experienced - exhibits a peculiar institutional form. The chapter argues that analysis of that distinctive form and the processes that produced it helps explain America's retention of capital punishment and provides clues regarding its institutional logic and contemporary social functions. Over the decades following the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) litigation, the Supreme Court effectively reinvented the death penalty in America.
