DISAGGREGATING THE EFFECTS OF RACIAL AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY ON EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EXECUTION RATES

This article examines how class inequality may have influenced the historical use of executions in the United States, both within the South and outside of the South. Specifically, this article asks whether executions acted as a mechanism to maintain an exploitative class system in the entire United States, just as lynching maintained a racial caste system in the South. Much of the literature on the historical determinants of macrolevel execution rates has examined these disparities in terms of racial inequality. This study demonstrates that racial inequality alone cannot account for the high number of executions that typified the early twentieth century United States and contends that it is important to expand our understanding of the effects of class inequality on both historical and contemporary trends in executions.