The protests following George Floyd’s death threw a harsh spotlight on the excesses and injustices of American policing and punishment, calling attention to mass incarceration, police killings, and racial disparities. And comparative scholarship has shown that America’s penal state is, on virtually every dimension, an international outlier, deploying the power to punish more intensively and extensively than any other nation. So why does America – a nation supposedly committed to small government and individual liberty – exhibit such a monstrous penal state?
Law and Order Leviathan answers that question, explaining why America has come to rely on penal control as the basis of social order. Bringing together a wealth of evidence from comparative social policy, political economy, the history of the state, and the sociology of violence, David Garland identifies the fundamental causes of America’s extraordinary regime of policing and punishment – and what can be done to alter them.
For much of your career, you specialized in criminology and the sociology of punishment, but for the last decade or so, you have been writing about other topics. What prompted you to return to questions of crime and control and to write this book?
David Garland: Like many others, I was deeply affected by the events of 2020. The massive protests of that summer made it seem possible that American policing and punishment might be transformed in some fundamental way, but already by the following year, the political mood of the nation had reverted to the old law-and-order politics. Watching this tragedy unfold has been a frustrating experience, not least because voices on both sides so frequently mis-state or over-simplify the vexed problems of crime, policing, and punishment. Having studied these topics for many years, I felt I was in a position to offer a more realistic account of the American system, explain its underlying causes, and provide some much-needed clarity about the possibilities for change.
What is the book’s argument?
DG: I begin by demonstrating the ways in which American policing and punishment are extraordinary when compared with other nations. I then show that the theme connecting the myriad practices of the American penal state is the singular emphasis on control – not retribution, or restitution, or rehabilitation, but the imposition of restraints on offenders. This massive deployment of penal control is, I argue, an attempt to compensate for the weakness of informal social controls that characterizes so many of America’s poorer communities; a weakness caused by political and economic processes that render these communities unstable, insecure, and socially disorganized.
Compared to other developed nations, the United States exhibits astonishingly high social problems rates together with levels of lethal violence that are simply unknown in other high-income nations. And these negative social indicators flow from America’s distinctive political economy and its extraordinary gun culture. Ironically, the same political economy that gives rise to these problems makes it difficult for government actors to deal with them. Under American-style capitalism, redistributive social policies have limited appeal and the governmental unit responsible for public safety – the local state – has sharply limited capacity. In the absence of the social measures and economic investments that other nations use to prevent crime and disorder, policing and punishment become the default solutions.
But surely every nation deploys police and prisons? Why is the American penal state so exceptionally aggressive?
DG: There are many causes at work here, ranging from the comparatively low quality of police and prison training and organization to the failure of the courts to hold these agencies accountable. Racism and racial stereotypes play a role too. But a fundamental cause of the aggression we see in the conduct of America’s police and prosecutors is the fact that so many offenders live in neighborhoods that are profoundly disorganized and dangerous. In a world where guns are ubiquitous, persons stopped by the police will be treated as possible assailants until they demonstrate otherwise. Similarly, where neighborhoods, families, and employers fail to impose informal social controls and are unable to give young men a stake in conformity, risk-averse prosecutors, sentencers, and parole boards will be less likely to return offenders to the community, and more inclined to incarcerate them. At base, it’s a matter of material conditions.
There have been many books about mass incarceration and aggressive policing. What is distinctive about your analysis?
DG: For one thing, the scope of the investigation. My book brings together relevant material from a range of different disciplines that are rarely integrated into a single analysis. Comparative social policy and political economy rarely inform research on the penal state. Findings from urban sociology and the sociology of crime and violence are hardly ever integrated with the sociology of policing and punishment. The history of American state formation is not often used to illuminate contemporary patterns of violence and gun ownership. So, the expansiveness and comprehensive character of the analysis is, I would say, a distinctive feature.
Another distinctive feature is the book’s focus on the causal mechanisms that link the macro structures of political economy with the street-level action of crime and control. Other scholars have suggested that America’s penal state is somehow related to the economic and racial inequality that characterizes the United States. But until now, we have lacked detailed accounts of how one is related to the other. Law and Order Leviathan identifies the intermediating processes, explaining how the pressures exerted by political economy adversely impact neighborhoods and families, triggering criminogenic processes that give rise to disorder, crime, and violence, which in turn attract the attentions of the penal state.
Fierce debates have raged between scholars about whether mass incarceration was caused by racism, by neoliberalism, or by rising crime rates. Where do you stand on this question?
DG: I would say that these debates are premised upon false dichotomies and oppositions. In the US, class and race have long been tightly and inextricably intertwined. Among the tragic legacies of slavery and Jim Crow is a racialized political economy in which wealth, income, and life chances are deeply skewed and a set of social and cultural arrangements (such as segregated neighborhoods and cultural stereotypes) that perpetuate racial inequality long after overt racism has been declared illegal.
Similarly, crime, race, and neoliberalism come bundled together, and cannot be treated as independent variables. Racial dynamics ensure that the residents of America’s poorest, most segregated, most disorganized neighborhoods are disproportionately Black, with the result that young Black males are disproportionately involved in violent crime, both as perpetrators and as victims. (Where white people live in similarly disadvantaged neighborhoods – a phenomenon that is quite uncommon – they display the same rates of violence, the effect being racially invariant.) The collapse of the New Deal order in the 1970s, and the subsequent withdrawal of government support for the urban poor, exacerbated the worklessness and demoralization caused by an increasingly deindustrialized economy, and led to a sharp spike in disorder, crime and lethal violence. This was the historic context in which American politicians began to grow the penal state: a development involving race, class, and crime in interlinked chains of cause and effect.
Why “Leviathan”?
DG: In the Bible’s Book of Job, “Leviathan” was the name of a fearsome sea monster, but its modern usage was given to us by Thomas Hobbes, who used the term to describe the modern state: a figure of enormous might to which “no power on earth can be compared.” In Hobbes’s famous account, Leviathan was established by the terms of a social contract in which the populace – in order to escape a chronically insecure “state of nature” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” – agrees to submit to Leviathan’s gargantuan power in exchange for protection from one another. I invoke the metaphor in the book’s title to convey three distinguishing features of America’s penal state: firstly, its monstrous, extraordinary nature; secondly, its grounding in popular fear of violence and disorder; and finally, its authorization by the American electorate.
If American policing and punishment are rooted in, and structured by, American-style capitalism does that mean that the penal state cannot be transformed until there is a revolution at the level of the political economy?
DG: That would be a very bleak prospect! But I don’t subscribe the doctrine of “all or nothing”, nor do I believe that nothing changes unless everything changes. (This puts me at odds with the utopian politics of “abolition,” which are, it seems to me, grounded in a despair about the possibility of real change.)
Precisely because the macro-structures of political economy impact patterns of crime and control via a series of relatively autonomous, community-level, intermediating processes, quite significant, even radical, changes can occur at the local level, even in the absence of larger structural change. And we know this because there are numerous real-world examples – which I describe in the Epilogue – of major changes that have occurred in specific American states or localities over the last two decades: changes that have reduced homicide rates, lowered rates of incarceration and youth detention, reduced the use of solitary confinement, reduced police violence, restored voting rights to former felons; and so on.
Who do you hope will read this book? Who will be upset by its arguments?
DG: I deliberately wrote Law and Order Leviathan in a very accessible style to ensure it can be read by anyone interested in the topic. There is a lengthy set of endnotes that provides sources, data, and further information for the specialist reader, but the text itself is very short – just over 130 pages – and can, I think, be understood by anyone.
Students and teachers are also a target audience, especially for the chapters on “America’s penal state” and “America’s political economy” which present, in summary form, a comprehensive description these of these two institutional fields which should be valuable teaching tools. But for the most part, the book is aimed at my fellow scholars in criminology and the sociology of punishment, with whom I have been in dialogue for many years, and in whose company I have developed the insights and understandings upon which the book rests.
The signature contribution of the book is a new theory about the causes of the penal state; about the mechanisms that link structures of political economy to processes of crime and crime control; and about the historical sources of America’s extraordinary levels of gun possession, criminal violence and penal control.
In the Epilogue, I trace out what I take to be the implications of that theory for political action in the shorter and longer terms. To the extent that this political analysis is at odds with conventional positions on the Left and on the Right, I expect that many people will be upset by it. I certainly hope so.
David Garland is Arthur T Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. His many books include Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition and The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction.