Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb . Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History. Assisted by Vincent A. Lacey. Albany : State University of New York Press . 2008 . Pp. xiii, 239. $65.00.

Abstract

This book is an exhaustive statistical analysis of the death penalty over the course of American history. Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb have compiled the most complete database of executions in the United States to date, noting the enormous difficulty in assembling an accurate and comprehensive list. Capital punishment was historically local in character, only placed under control of the individual states in the nineteenth century. The authors' analysis is descriptive, looking at the what, rather than the why, of capital punishment. They focus entirely on the numbers, deciding to forego the use of anecdote because of its potential to mislead by making the exceptional seem the norm. Interestingly, they incorporate extralegal lynchings into their compendium of executions, as lynching frequently included claims that mob actions represented the will of the community. In dizzying detail, the authors examine executions in both absolute number and in relation to overall population. And because they eschew anecdotes over statistics, it is a remarkably bloodless read, one filled with dry analysis rather than individual interactions with the law. Allen and Clubb's conclusions are not startlingly new. Historians will not be surprised to learn that there was considerable regional variation in the use of the death penalty, that executions decreased between the colonial period and the present, that the number of crimes meriting the death penalty declined, and that few women were executed, while a disproportionate number of African American, ethnic, and poor men died at the hands of the state.