Law and Order Leviathan : America's extraordinary regime of policing and punishment / David Garland.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Garland, David, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Prison-industrial complex--United States.
• Mass incarceration--Economic aspects--United States.
• Crime--United States--Sociological aspects.
• Crime--Political aspects--United States.

Genre:

• Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 219 pages)

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2025.

Summary:

• "How American-style capitalism creates a coercive state unlike any other. How 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 political economy impacts crime and policing. He argues that there is nothing paradoxical in America's reliance on coercive state controls; the nation's vaunted liberalism is largely an economic liberalism devoted to free markets and corporate power rather than to individual dignity and flourishing. Fear of violent crime and distrust of others ensure public support for this coercive Leviathan; racism enables indifference to its harms.America's carceral regime will remain an outlier until America's economy is structurally transformed. And yet, Garland argues, there is a path to reduced violence and significant penal reform even in the absence of structural change. Law and Order Leviathan sets out a powerful theory of the relation between political economy and crime control and a realistic framework for pursuing progressive change"-- Provided by publisher.
• "Provides a substantive look at the current debates around American policing and punishment through a sociological and historical explanation of the American penal state, while arguing that the highly racialized and ultraliberal political economy of the US continues to create a default country of control amid demands for reform"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

• Prologue From Tocqueville to Hobbes
• Challenging Leviathan
• Towards A Comparative Structural Analysis
• America's Penal State
• The Control Imperative
• America's Political Economy
• Political Economy and Social Disorder
• Political Institutions and Crime Control
• Social Sources of Indifference
• Epilogue Constraints and Possibilities.

Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-691-27121-6

OCLC:

1520915782