Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America.
By Anne-Marie Cusac.

New Haven, London: Yale University Press, March 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-300-11174-3. 336 pages.

Review by Henrike Lehnguth, University of Maryland

Anne-Marie Cusac’s Cruel and Unusual is ambitious in the attempt to illuminate what she calls the “culture of punishment.” The book aims at presenting how this culture emerged historically, while also detailing the pervasive imperative to punish today. Cusac argues that it is above all American Christian thought and practices that have shaped the excessive investments in penalization from the seventeenth century onward and initiated a shift towards more severe prison sentences and harmful control technologies in the late 1970s.

While some of Cusac’s attempts to ground ideas about punishment in religious thought are promising, the ties she establishes between excessive penalization and Christianity are ultimately inconclusive. Since social developments involving early white settlers in colonial America were unequivocally shaped by Christian beliefs and interpretations, the ways in which punishment was conceived would be expected to link to religious thought. This connection should, however, not, as Cruel and Unusual suggests, lead to the conclusion that American Christians understood penalization and its place in the social arena univocally. Cusac herself mentions with the “passionately religious” Benjamin Rush and the Quakers moderate Christian voices that dissented from status quo agendas on corporal punishment. Connections between “the culture of punishment” and Christian thought are therefore more ambiguous than Cusac’s initial arguments let us believe.

Cusac also places Christianity at the heart of the late 1970s shift towards harsher criminal laws. While the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1960s certainly factored into the changes in cultural attitudes that Cusac discusses, Cruel and Unusual offers no systematic analysis of how these changes came about. This omission is problematic, when not only the Christian Right but the Civil Rights Movement drew on Christian inspiration during the 1960s for what were very different social agendas. When Cusac thus ties the notions of “essential criminals” that evolved in the late 1970s to Christian traditions, one is left wondering what happened to those other Christian discourses that inspired struggles for social justice and racial equality.

To delineate a historical trajectory is, however, only one of two larger aims of the book that, overall, attempts to demonstrate that “the culture of punishment” is a viable construct. The second half of the book is therefore more concerned with contemporary facets of this culture. Cusac sketches these facets with a detailed discussion of popular television crime shows, stunning technologies, and Christian spanking manuals that leave no doubt that these are her areas of expertise and interest that she has long been familiar with in her work as a journalist.

While her case studies work well as resources on specific topics such as stunning, the ways in which Cusac selected her examples as evidence for a larger cultural trend is not apparent. Her discussion of Christian spanking manuals, for instance, overdetermines the relevance of the manuals for the United States at large, when child abuse is, after all, a serious legal offense. It is in this context unclear why Cusac attributes larger significance to the existence of spanking manuals than the legal structure within which they operate.

Cusac’s analysis of popular culture follows a similar pattern. Although her discussion of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist persuasively supports her arguments about the shift in cultural attitudes in the late 1970s, some of her other findings are not as generalizable. Her investigation of crime television shows, for instance, presumes that all crime programs engage in the same ideological work. While tough sentencing and physical punishment are advocated in some shows like Fox’s 24, various cable television programs present a different kind of picture. HBO series The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008 and thus partially coincided with Fox’s 24, went at length to present audiences with multi-dimensional, likeable characters—be they involved in crime or law enforcement. The series repeatedly pointed to the structural factors that contribute to crime, such as the lack of political will and financial backing to address poverty and better schooling.

In spite of these challenges that Cruel and Unusual comes with, the notion of a “culture of punishment” is an important one. A culture of punishment assumes a pervasive investment in particular thoughts and practices that cherish penalization. The notion draws important interdisciplinary connections between different fields of study that, as Cusac successful shows, should be considered alongside and in dialogue with each other. Overall, Cusac’s book thus presents a necessary starting point for further research on the various manifestations of and investments in punishment.