With more than 550,000 people under some form of criminal justice supervision, and having recently performed its 517th execution by lethal injection, the Lone Star State has a reputation for harsh judicial punishment. Similarly, while the Texan prison population has actually decreased (albeit marginally) over the past five years, the phrase âDonât Mess With Texasâ has nevertheless gained symbolic significance far beyond the anti-littering campaign for which it was originally contrived. Still heralded as one of the most punitive places in the Western world, Texas supposedly âreigns supreme in the punishment industryâ (Perkinson 2010, p. 4).
As this book will demonstrate lots of people are telling stories about Texas and within these stories the state governors are ruthless, executions are speedy, conditions of confinement austere and guilt not always determined. Indeed, one need not delve far into the literature on punishment in general and death penalty literature in particular to find the image of Texas being (re)produced as a place of particularly punitive punishment.
In Peculiar Institution: Americaâs Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, David Garland (2010) refers to Texas as a âhigh-volume execution stateâ (p. 47); Texas is said to perform a âremarkably highâ number of executions each year (p. 68) and the retention of capital punishment is described as âsustained and enthusiastic in Texasâ (p. 192). Similarly, in the introductory pages of Americaâs Death Penalty: Between Past and Present, McGowan (2011, p. 17) notes that there is a particular âenthusiasmâ for harsh punishment in the Lone Star State when compared to other US states. In addition, Andrew Hammel (2002, p. 107) constructs the image of Texas as a place of harsh punishment in The Machinery of Death: The Reality of Americaâs Death Penalty Regime, when he refers to the Texan death penalty as a âjuggernautâ; a âmassive inexorable forceâ that will âcrush whatever is placed in its pathâ. Armstrong and Mills (2003, p. 103) suggest that executions by lethal injection have become something of a âroutine occurrenceâ in Texas. Koch et al. (2012, p. 150) tell us that Texas is the âpublic face of executionâ and Bessler (2003, p. 223) contends that Texas is the only state which âregularly executes offendersâ. In short, Texas is âAmericaâs death penalty capitalâ, and due to an apparent zeal for harsh justice, the state has âemerged as particularly symbolic on all levelsâ (Randle 2005, p. 103).
So these scholars are all telling similar stories about Texas and within these stories the Lone Star State is portrayed as a place of particularly harsh punishment. It is easy to see how and why Texas has come to symbolise a particular style of justice and to reflect a particular approach to penal punishment. Responsible for around one third of US executions since the moratorium (which was lifted by the Supreme Court in the 1970s) and imprisoning more people each year than any other state, Texas continues to uphold its reputation for toughness in the penal sphere. Yet interestingly, criminologists regularly describe but rarely discuss Texas in specific termsâthere are often only passing references to the Lone Star State and its execution behaviour. We see a number of scholars who continue to representâand one might argue actively constructâthe image of Texas as a place of harsh punishment without much suggestion as to why Texas seems to have broken away from the rest of the US. Moreover, these scholarly stories told about Texas can actually be understood as what Ewick and Silbey (1995, p. 197) have termed a âhegemonic taleâ; together they tell a story which reproduces a somewhat âtaken-for-granted narrativeâ about Texas and its relationship with punishment.
This book therefore seeks to provide a more nuanced examination of Texan penal practices by uncovering and analysing the stories Texas tells about its own relationship with punishment. We will be investigating the stories ofâas opposed to aboutâthe Texan collective. The aim of this book is thus two-fold: firstly it will argue for a state-specific approach to the study of US punishment, and secondly it will offer an illustrative example of how this can be realised by investigating the stories Texas tells about punishment. This second aim is achieved by way of a narrative analysis undertaken in Lone Star punishment museums and tourist sites, something I will explain further in Chap. 2.
In its entirety then, the book draws on diverse work, including criminological scholarship about cultural representations of punishment and Southern cultural values, as well as research in museum studies, dark tourism and cultural memory. Together this scholarship will be used to argue that museums are under-researched sites of criminological significance. This book is thus also intended as a contribution to a new methodological paradigm within the social sciences in which museums are seen as environments of narrativity. While other authors have undertaken punishment museum analyses, we have yet to see a sustained and robust analysis of punishment museums undertaken in the âexecution capitalâ of America.
References
Armstrong, K., and S. Mills. 2003. âUntil I Can Be Sureâ: How the threat of executing the innocent has transformed the death penalty debate. In Beyond repair? Americaâs death penalty, ed. S.P. Garvey. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Bessler, A. 2003. Kiss of death: Americaâs love affair with the death penalty. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Ewick, P., and S. Silbey. 1995. Subversive stories and hegemonic tales: Toward a sociology of narrative. Law and Society Review 29(2): 197â226.CrossRef
Garland, D. 2010. Peculiar institution: Americaâs death penalty in an age of abolition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hammel, A. 2002. Jousting with the juggernaut. In Machinery of death: The reality of Americaâs death penalty regime, ed. M. Dow and D. Dow, 107â126. New York: Routledge.
Koch, L.W., L. Wark, and J.F. Galliher. 2012. The death of the American death penalty: States still leading the way. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
McGowan, R. 2011. Getting the question right? Ways of thinking about the death penalty. In Americaâs death penalty: Between past and present, ed. D. Garland, R. McGowan, and M. Meranze, 1â29. New York: New York University Press.CrossRef
Perkinson, R. 2010. Texas tough: The rise of Americaâs prison empire. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Randle, J. 2005. The cultural lives of capital punishment in the United States. In The cultural lives of capital punishment: Comparative perspectives, ed. A. Sarat and C. Boulanger, 92â111. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stories are an important way in which we make sense of ourselves and those around us. They can be personal tales of conquest or defeat, political narratives of power or resistance, sensational reports of morality or depravity. Some stories encourage a subtle change in routine while others incite people to march the streets demanding change. Some become legends cemented in time, others are destined to be forgotten even by those who tell them. Whether they make us laugh or cry, angry or relaxed, stories are everywhereâfrom Charles Darwinâs On The Origin of Species to the many infamous guests on The Jeremy Kyle Show; from the pedagogical parables of the Bible to my âNanny Enidâ and her tales of my fatherâs childhood escapades. Whether we tell our stories to a global, local or familial audience matters not. Indeed we may even tell our stories in complete solitude. Irrespective of who is listening we live in a storied world.
Moreover, we often use stories to explain our actions both to ourselves and to others because they are the best way of describing the social world as it is lived by usâthe storyteller (Plummer 1995; Polkinghorne 1988). Groups can also tell stories, and these narratives of the âcollectiveâ act as a resource from which to construct our own understanding of the self (Presser 2009). Gubrium and Holstein (2008, p. 255) have described the stories we hear about the collective as a set of ânarrative nesting dollsâ; while any story told about ourselves is always (partially) local, it will also âreverberate within larger social stories and circumstancesâ. Any story-of-the-self will be embedded within a number of stories told about the collective, and these ânarrative nesting dollsâ vocalise together to construct both individual and collective identity. For the purposes of this research then, the stories Texasâas a collectiveâtells about punishment have the potential to reveal the Texan commitment to harsh justice in more nuanced ways, allowing us to view the social world from the perspective of the storyteller. As outlined in the Introduction, many criminologists are telling their own stories about the Lone Star State, but few are listening to the stories Texas is telling. This research seeks to understand the Texan self-identity and its relationship with punishment as a cultural insider.
So where, as a non-Texan, would a researcher find these social stories? Local news reporting about capital cases was an option, but local media rarely cover executions in any great detail (see Jacoby et al. 2008). Similarly, of all aspects of the criminal justice process, prisons and the Department of Corrections more broadly receive fairly limited coverage (see Chermak 1998). Likewise, interviewing individual Texans would not really suffice; it was never the aim of this book to examine individual preferences and attitudes toward punishment. Instead it was the punishment stories of the collective which were of interest and, more specifically, the cultural justification narratives which manifest within those collective stories. While it might have been possible to examine the underlying narratives of punishment found in local news stories or through interviews, it was a more stable longer-lived story of punishment I was seeking and after much searching I found it in a somewhat unlikely place; punishment museums.
Museums have long acted as research sites in other disciplines, yet criminologists are only now beginning to realise their potential as storied spaces (see for example Brown 2009; Piché and Walby 2010, 2012; Wilson 2008). As part of the research which informs this book, I visited tourist sites associated with law enforcement and punishment in Texas. In total I spent approximately six months travelling around the Lone Star State on Greyhound buses, and was able to visit, for example, the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville; defunct jail cells in Beaumont and Eastland; the Houston Police Museum; the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso and the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco.
In addition, I also toured the top visited historical sites in Texas. These included the Story of Texas Museum (Austin); the Alamo Shrine (San Antonio); the Stockyards (Fort Worth); the San Jacinto Monument (Houston) and the State Capitol (Austin). Many criminological accounts which seek to explain punitive punishment in the Southern states draw an historical line between the past and the present. For example, Nisbett and Cohen (1996) discuss the influence of the history of herding; Perkinson (2010) the history of racial unrest; Zimring (2003) the history of âvigilance valuesâ; and Rice and Coates (1995) the history of gender roles. Taken together, this diverse collection of studies argues that the Southern past is a significant resource for understanding the Southern present.
However, as I have already made clear, my goal was a little different to those scholars cited above. I was less concerned with the reality of Texan history; instead my interest lay in cultural stories Texas uses to remember that historyâthe narratives of the collective. I wanted to explore the representation of a Lone Star past, and where better to look than the top visited historical sites in Texas. Indeed, as I will discuss further in Part IV of this book, the reputation Texas has gained as a place of harsh punishment was not confined to the stories told in punishment museums; this reputation for toughness likewise revealed itself in historical sites of the Lone Star memory....
