Dr. David Garland

"Law and Order Leviathan: A Theory of America’s Extraordinary Penal State”

Abstract: Why is America, that storied land of liberty, home to mass incarceration, police killings, and racialized criminal justice? My lecture traces the structural sources of America’s extraordinary penal state and the community-level processes through which they impact crime and policing. I argue that America’s carceral regime will remain an international outlier until America’s political economy is structurally transformed. Nevertheless, within these structural constraints, there is a bandwidth of variation that could allow reduced violence and significant penal reform even in the absence of fundamental change. 

David Garland, widely considered one of the world’s leading scholars of crime and punishment, is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Professor of Sociology in NYU’s Department of Sociology. Garland is the author of a series of award-winning books, including Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (1st edition, 1985; new edition 2018); Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (1990); The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (2001); Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010); and The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (2016) each of which has been translated into several languages. He has been elected to membership of learned societies in both the United States and the United Kingdom, being a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Garland was a Davis Fellow at Princeton University’s History Department and a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow.