David Garland’s “Law and Order Leviathan” is a powerful work about how the United States got here and what should happen next.
David Garland’s new book, “Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment,” is a sweeping historical and sophisticated critique of our penal and policing institutions — and it is only 219 pages. Given the book’s extraordinary ambition, one might think that it would need to be at least twice this relatively short and readable length. But such a conclusion ignores what this review contends, namely, that it is foolish to attempt to understand the significance of “Law and Order Leviathan” without placing it in the larger context of Garland’s overall opus.
Starting with “Punishment and Modern Society” (1993), retrospectively creditable as a founding text of the sociology of punishment, Garland showed how particular theoretical frameworks from those of Émile Durkheim to Michel Foucault have influenced how societies respond to criminality writ large. In “The Culture of Control” (2002), he went on to become more empirical as well as theoretical, looking at how neoliberal responses to crime developed in Britain and the United States. But it is in his last two books — “Peculiar Institution” (2010) and now “Law and Order Leviathan” (2025) — that Garland offers two specific case studies in the most neoliberal society of all, the United States.
Indeed, both his last and present book deal with American exceptionalism, arguing that America is an outlier when it comes to capital punishment and in being the most punitive society in the world. The goal of “Law and Order Leviathan,” writes the author, is “simple”: to explain the development of yet another peculiar American institution, the scale and power of our system of policing and punishment in the United States. He notes early on that his challenge now is to explain the “three distinguishing features of America’s penal state: its monstrous, extraordinary nature; its grounding in popular fear of violence and disorder; and its authorization by the American electorate.”
Across all of Garland’s impressive work, too, runs meticulous use of research and exemplary writing: Without doubt, he is one of the most effective social scientists of his era in presenting clearly written, jargon-free analyses. His characteristically powerful argument here is best summarized in the book’s preface:
This book explains … America’s peculiar penal state by showing that it is grounded in, and indirectly caused by, the structures of America’s political economy — a set of structures that, like the penal state, is highly unusual in comparative terms.
I argue that because of that political economy, American criminal justice operates against a background of social dislocation, impoverishment, and gun violence to a degree unknown in other developed nations. In contrast to more conventional comparative accounts, I argue that it is not racism, nor religion nor punitive culture that sets America’s penal state apart …What sets it apart is the socioeconomic context and material conditions in which America’s criminal legal system operates … the restructuring of political economy that occurred after the 1960s served to deepen social dislocation and lethal violence, while limiting the extent to which government could deploy positive means to remedy them. It was in these circumstances, and from these causes, that America’s law and order Leviathan first emerged.
Importantly, Garland does not pretend that this leviathan evolved in a vacuum; he does not shy away from detailing America’s extraordinary levels of violence coupled with the easy availability of guns. In an era marked by little to no political nuance, he makes a complex argument about high levels of violence in the United States stemming from high levels of inequality, concentrated poverty and social exclusion, none of which can be separated from our history of slavery and segregation and an extremely weak welfare state. That such levels of violence would then be used as political capital by elected officials to further America’s punitive turn, as opposed to addressing the racialized political economy that created these conditions in the first place, is part and parcel of and indeed quite fundamental to Garland’s explanatory framework.
Garland is skeptical of prison and police abolitionist arguments, contending, a la Durkheim, that all modern societies will have some level of crime and require ways to deal with people who either don’t comply with community-based sanctions or commit acts so heinous that coercive control is called for. Since, for Garland, it is the political economy itself — namely American capitalism, mediated and hugely amplified by race, racism and our history of slavery — that primarily explains the origins of our punitive state, some may complain that the issue of race is downplayed as an independent driver of our massive carceral state. But Garland’s point about political economy’s primacy has not been emphasized nearly as much or as well in contemporary sociology and criminology as it is elaborated here.
Would I agree, though, that police budgets need to be “improved” to provide materially better training and supervision? No, since there are plenty of ways to do this without additional funding. But this is a minor disagreement in terms of Garland’s overarching analysis.
Garland importantly posits that local governments in the United States are capable of mediating the powerful influences of the national political economy since our criminal justice system is in fact hyperlocal. Consequently, meaningful and sustainable criminal justice reform can and should occur. In Garland’s words, “even if Nordic or Western European levels remain out of reach, there is nevertheless the real possibility of life altering improvements in policing, punishment, and public safety within the U.S. bandwidth … activists, reformers, open-minded officials, and the members of the public who support them can take steps to reduce the power and reach of America’s law and order Leviathan without waiting for that larger transformation.”
Here, Garland is articulating an immensely meaningful and relevant dynamic — namely, how to find a balance between working to achieve a fundamentally democratic and non-discriminatory society while prioritizing the immediacy of desperately needed reforms. It is not simply that achieving deep and sustainable societal reform will take a long time at the national level. In addition, the hyperlocal nature of the American criminal justice system — 17,521 state and local police departments, 3,100 jail systems, 50 state prison and parole systems, 2,300 elected district attorneys and 1,900 county probation systems — suggests that even significant national economic, political and social reform will not necessarily result in immediate changes in criminal justice policy at the local level given the decentralized nature of our system of justice.
That means it is not just essential but also a moral imperative to work on reforming our systems now. For some, just the word “reform” has a pejorative connotation as opposed to “structural change” or “abolition.” But I would argue that whether one defines oneself as an abolitionist or a reformer, or something in between, change must happen at a local level. We cannot simply wait for the larger structural transformation of society to occur. At the same time, local reform efforts can and should work together with broader efforts at making national structural change.
Garland lists a host of successful criminal justice reforms, to which I add a few, that are not meaningless tinkering but have improved the lives of millions of people. Many of these reforms have happened at the same time overall indicators of equality and poverty were getting worse, not better. These include a decline in the nation’s imprisonment rate from 754 per 100,000 in 2008 to 580 per 100,000 last year; a drop in the NYC jail population from over 20,000 in 1991 to under 7,000 this year; a 25% reduction in the nation’s homicide rate in the last 30 years; an almost 75% reduction in the nation’s rate of youth detention in the last 25 years and a more than 40% decrease in police arrests nationally from 2006 to 2020.
Then too, both New York and Illinois have enacted significant reforms in their systems of cash bail; Georgia, Mississippi and Oklahoma have all enacted sentencing reforms and even Texas invested hundreds of millions of dollars in community-based drug treatment and mental health programs and subsequently closed several prisons.
New York City has a plan to further reduce its jail population and close Rikers Island; the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has voted to close its Men’s Central Jail (the Los Angeles version of Rikers); and the prison systems of New York, New Jersey and California have decreased by about 50% since 2000. Even the Louisiana and Mississippi systems declined by about 30% over the same period. Finally, 10 states have abolished the death penalty in the last 20 years, leaving a total of 23 states that no longer use capital punishment.
The work to shrink the footprint of harm caused by our “Law and Order Leviathan” is, as Garland points out, both local and essential. Through decades of academic work, Garland has labored intellectually to provide high-level social and economic analyses of how we got to where we are. The obstacles to reform can seem overwhelming. But even in our current toxic national political environment, the possibilities for serious criminal justice reform at the local level are real in many places, especially since local governments have to make concrete and difficult decisions about how to spend limited tax dollars.
For someone like myself who has spent the better part of his life in the trenches of state and city justice reform, it is both illuminating and frustrating to perceive how small your place is within the larger sociological and historical picture that Garland brilliantly paints across his books. In that larger context, the project of local reform work can seem daunting, particularly the prospect of making significant change in literally thousands of different jurisdictions across the country. But it does also remind one of that old adage about how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
