Research Links Historical Lynchings to Modern Murder Rates and Capital Punishment

Recent research has revealed a close cor­re­la­tion between the U.S. states that his­tor­i­cal­ly car­ried out the most lynch­ings and the states that today have the high­est homi­cide rates and most death sentences. 

In a study led by soci­ol­o­gist Steven Messner of the State University of New York at Albany, coun­ty data from 10 south­ern states where his­tor­i­cal­ly reli­able infor­ma­tion on vig­i­lante lynch­ings between 1882 and 1930 is avail­able were exam­ined (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee). The study then com­pared this infor­ma­tion to more recent homi­cide data com­piled from 1986 to 1995 by the FBI and National Center for Health Statistics. The com­par­i­son revealed that the coun­ties with the most lynch­ings had the high­est homi­cide rates, and the coun­ties with few­er lynch­ings had com­par­a­tive­ly few­er mur­ders, even when researchers con­trolled for fac­tors such as pop­u­la­tion, pover­ty, low lev­els of edu­ca­tion, the per­cent­age of young peo­ple in the pop­u­la­tion, the unem­ploy­ment rate, and the per­cent­age of single-parent households. 

Messner not­ed that ​“lynch­ing seems to mat­ter and is rel­e­vant to our under­stand­ing of con­tem­po­rary lethal vio­lence” in the South. The lat­est issue of the American Sociological Review con­tains more infor­ma­tion about this study.

In a sec­ond study con­duct­ed by soci­ol­o­gists David Jacobs and Jason T. Carmichael of Ohio State University and Stephanie L. Kent of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, research revealed that the num­ber of death sen­tences for all crim­i­nals – black and white – was high­er in states with a his­to­ry of lynch­ings. The link was par­tic­u­lar­ly strong when the researchers ana­lyzed only death sen­tences for black defendants. 

The soci­ol­o­gists the­o­rize that the death penal­ty became a legal replace­ment for the lynch­ings of the past, and that the num­ber of death sen­tences in states with the most lynch­ings increased as the state’s pop­u­la­tion of African Americans grew. The researchers not­ed that this trend sug­gests that ​“cur­rent racial threat and past vig­i­lan­tism large­ly direct­ed against new­ly freed slaves joint­ly con­tribute to cur­rent lethal but legal reac­tions to racial threat.” 

This research will be pub­lished in an upcom­ing issue of the American Sociologial Review.