Race and lethal forms of social control: A preliminary investigation into execution and self-help in the United States, 1930–1964

Abstract

of “self-help” ‐ personal and collective reactions to harmful or unjust actions perpetrated by others. We see self-help in crimes of passion, such as when a husband murders his wife and her lover. We see self-help in crimes of employee theft, when workers take wages-in-kind. Sometimes, people take the law into their own hands, or, more accurately, they exact justice beyond the scope of the law. There is historical variability in the frequency and intensity of actions Black defines as self-help. To account for change, he turns to the portrait of the past Thomas Hobbes paints in Leviathan. 2 The natural rights of selfdefense and protection of property are implied in Hobbes conception of human nature, wherein self-preservation is expressed in the desire to dominate others and appropriate the bounty of nature and the efforts of labor. Before state and law, individuals suffered in a predatory environment where the cardinal virtues were force and fraud. Anarchy and war were the circumstances of the natural state of the human condition. The solution to this undesirable situation is government. People constitute state and law to impose order necessary for liberty. Where the law and its enforcement are weak, expressions of direct self-preservation are more frequent. According to Black, “Hobbesian theory would lead us to expect more violence and other crimes of self-help in those contemporary settings where law ‐ governmental social control ‐ is least developed, and, indeed, this appears to fit the facts: Crimes of self-help are more likely where law is less available.” 3 Black articulates his adaptation of Hobbes’ story in a manner that renders it subject to empirical evaluation. The absence or ineffective presence of state and law is associated with individuals taking it upon themselves to defend their persons and property and to right wrongs. One may hypothesize that official action and self-help, especially when similar in form, are substitutable