David Garland
Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment was published by Princeton University Press in August 2025.
1. What is the book about?
Law and Order Leviathan asks why America’s penal state is so extraordinary when compared with other developed nations? Why do American police kill civilians at much higher rates than in other advanced nations? Why do US courts impose more extensive and intensive penal controls? And why do poor Black Americans bear the brunt of this repression?
To this scholarly inquiry it adds a political question: how should we respond to the radical ‘abolitionist’ agenda that exploded onto the scene in the summer of 2020 and which is now embedded in parts of the US academy – with its ‘root cause’ analysis (the penal state as an expression of racial capitalism) and its stated ambition of ending police and abolishing the prison?
The book explains America’s extraordinary penal state by tracing, in detail, the impact of America’s political economy on social order and violence – and on policing and punishment, developing a structural theory of American social order and penal control. The relationship of the macro-structures of political economy to the micro-processes of disorder and violence, policing and punishment, is shown to be indirect, operating through intermediating community-level processes that are relatively autonomous, allowing for variation (across the different states and over time) and for reformative interventions – even in the absence of larger structural change.
Running alongside the impact of America’s ultra-liberal, racialized political economy is the extraordinary pervasiveness of guns and gun-violence. I offer a historical account of American violence and gun culture, showing that they were concomitants of a distinctive process of state formation which was, again, quite extraordinary when compared with European processes. As I show, the American state never monopolized legitimate violence but instead shared coercive functions with local and non-state actors; while tolerating and legally-empowering a heavily-armed popula.
Having set out a theory the relations between political economy and penal state, and of the American difference, the book ends by reflecting on the political implications of this analysis. Its Epilogue argues that while “abolition” may help mobilize people to demand an end to American-style penality, as a sociological matter, neither the police nor the prison is liable to be abolished in any foreseeable future – least of all in the USA.
The outlier status of America’s penal Leviathan will persist unless and until the nation’s political economy is transformed. However, there is a a “bandwidth” of possible variation within which American crime, policing, and punishment can be changed: a structurally determined floor and ceiling between which lies the possibility of significant reform. That bandwidth of variation is a key part of the theoretical analysis set out in the book, and an empirical fact confirmed by recent developments that I describe and document.
2. Why did I write it?
I began writing this shortly after the murder of George Floyd, at a moment when radical demands – Defund the police! Abolish the prison! – broke into mainstream political debate. I wanted to confirm the radical idea that America’s extraordinary penal state is not simply a policy choice but is instead a structural feature, rooted in its underlying political economy. I wanted to show in detail how America’ labor market and welfare state generate not just inequality and insecurity, but also social disorganization and violence, while depriving the state of the capacity to respond with anything other than police and punishment. And I wanted to highlight that the willingness of Americans to tolerate this monstrous state of affairs was itself a result of segregation and a consequent lack of basic human solidarity.
3. How did I go about doing this research and what further work is needed in this field?
The book brings together material from many disciplines – comparative social policy and political economy; urban sociology and the sociology of violence; American state formation and the history of gun ownership – and integrates them into a single analysis. It focuses on the causal mechanisms that link macro structures with the street-level action of crime and control. Others have argued that America’s penal state is related to economic inequality, racial prejudice and a punitive culture. But until now, we have lacked detailed accounts that reveal social mechanisms and causal processes. Law and Order Leviathan identifies these 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.
The book develops a theory of social structure’s relation to policing and punishment. The book focuses on the US case but the theory is in principle generalizable. My hope is that other scholars will use this theory to study other jurisdictions – refining, refuting, or confirming it, as the case may be.