David Garland, Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law, will receive two awards from the American Society of Criminology (ASC) at its annual meeting in Chicago on November 14-17. He has won not only the Edwin H. Sutherland Award, the society’s top honor, for “outstanding contributions to theory or research in criminology on the etiology of criminal and deviant behavior, the criminal justice system, corrections, law, or justice,” but also the Michael J. Hindelang Award, given annually for a book published within the previous three years that constitutes “the most outstanding contribution to research in criminology.”
Garland’s book Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, an examination of the persistence of capital punishment in the U.S., has already garnered several other honors, including a PROSE Award in the field of law and legal studies as well as the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore Book Award and Mary Douglas Book Award. It also prompted a positive review by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in the New York Review of Books that Peculiar Institutions “makes a powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.”
As a recipient of the Sutherland Award, Garland will make a plenary speech, which will be published in the ASC’s scholarly journal, Criminology.
Posted on September 7, 2012