The case of high rates of killing in inner-city ghettoes - especially black ghettoes - in the 1960s to 1990s is familiar. Loïc Waquant (2004) has attrib-uted the ‘decivilising process' that took place there to two interrelated proc-esses: on the one hand, the collapse of legitimate steady employment and its replacement by unemployment, insecure casual employment and the illicit economy notably of the drug trade; and on the other hand, the concomitant withdrawal of the agencies of the state - from police to post of?ces - from the ghettoes in the Reagan years and after. Correlated with this has been the replacement of a 'welfare safety net' with a 'penal dragnet', which has swept huge numbers of young American men, more especially African-American men, into jail (Pettit and Western 2004).
Less familiar, but historically related, is the fact that a very disproportionate part of American homicide occurs in the South, and in those parts of the West that were preponderantly settled from the South (Lane 1997: 350).
The relative weakness of the institutions of the state is the common factor. I do not, of course, mean a 'state of the Union', except incidentally, but am using the concept of 'state' in the standard sociological sense formulated by Max Weber (1978 [1920]: i, 54): an organisation which successfully upholds a claim to binding rule making over a territory, by virtue of commanding a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. The process of monopolisation was much delayed and less thorough in the South than the North, as already implied when discussing the Southern tradition of 'honour'. The tradition of 'taking the law into one's own hands' remained strong. In many south-ern States, it was for a long time actually legal for a man to kill his wife's lover (Stearns 1989). (In the 1920s, Georgia struck an early blow for women's liberation by also making it legal for a woman to kill her husband's lover.) Lynching, mainly of African American men, declined after the 1920s, but did not die out until the 1960s; county by county in the South, there is a high correlation between the incidence of lynching in the past and that of homi-cide at the present day (Messner et al. 2005). It is signi?cant that by far the greatest use of the death penalty occurs in those states and counties where vigilante activity (Brown 1975) and lynchings were most common in the past, and a very disproportionate fraction of those executed are African Americans (Zimring 2003: 89-118).