Law and Order Leviathan
America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment
In Law and Order Leviathan, David Garland advocates for a holistic approach to understanding and fixing American penal policy.
Garland begins his measured and stinging analysis of American penal policy with an overview of the police and prison abolition protest movements that skyrocketed to public attention after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. Sympathizing with these protests’ aims, the book broadens its scope to address the contextual roots of American penal practices and spotlight the shortcomings of popular responses. While racism and class anxiety play a clear role in these abuses, the book claims, the fundamental reasons for this often-exceptional brutality can be traced to the unique background features of American life. Drawing on contemporary data, the book demonstrates that most Americans live in settings that are far more violent, less trusting, more precarious, and protected by fewer safety nets than in almost any other developed nation. To address the problem of penal overreach, Garland claims, Americans must be prepared to launch a decades-long reform of these “background facts” of social life.
The book’s ambitious scale is matched by the range of data points it incorporates. It expends great effort describing the differences between American and Western European legal processes, firearm policies, rates of recidivism, and welfare structures. Even so, the sheer range of ground covered, combined with the book’s frequent promises that it will synthesize all these elements at some later point, create a somewhat diffident tone in the early chapters. Still, the book’s argument stands as one of the most provocative and grounded perspectives on American penal policy in the contested contemporary landscape.
Through a rigorous comparative analysis, Law and Order Leviathan calls for a more systematic and bottom-up approach to restructuring America’s carceral state.
Reviewed by
Isaac Randel
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