Law and Order Leviathan : America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment

How American-style capitalism creates a coercive state unlike any otherHow could America, that storied land of liberty, be home to mass incarceration, police killings, and racialized criminal justice?In Law and Order Leviathan, David Garland explains how America’s racialized political economy gives rise to this extraordinary outcome. The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture.Garland shows how, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence and social problems at levels altogether unknown in other affluent nations.Aggressive policing and punishment became the default response. Marshalling a wealth of evidence, Garland shows that America lags behind comparable nations in protections for working people.He identifies the structural sources of America’s penal state and the community-level processes through which poli