The lat­est edi­tion of Lapham’s Quarterly fea­tures essays from a wide vari­ety of authors reflect­ing on crime and pun­ish­ment. At least one of the arti­cles, by Christopher Hitchens, focus­es on the death penal­ty. In ​“Staking a Life,” Hitchens draws on his back­ground in reli­gion, moral­i­ty, and gov­ern­ment to explore why the United States con­tin­ues to uti­lize cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment while many of our allies have aban­doned it. ​“I have heard a num­ber of sug­gest­ed answers: two in par­tic­u­lar have some super­fi­cial plau­si­bil­i­ty,” he writes. ​“The first is an old con­nec­tion between exe­cu­tions and racism, and the sec­ond is the rel­a­tive­ly short dis­tance in time that sep­a­rates the mod­ern U.S. from the days of fron­tier jus­tice.” He con­cludes: ​“At once too ran­dom and too insti­tu­tion­al and sys­tem­at­ic, this dire [death penal­ty] busi­ness has now become an offense both to law and to justice.”

The mag­a­zine fea­tures a vari­ety of essays and art depict­ing crime and pun­ish­ment from around the world. (See C. Hitchens, ​“Staking a Life,” in Lapham’s Quarterly 207, Spring 2009). See Articles.

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