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David Garland, "Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
David Garland
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
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Zalman Neufeld
Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneer Zalman Neufeld. In his book Law and Order, Leviathan, America's Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment, published by Princeton University Press in 2025, David Garland explores the roots of the current mass incarceration plaguing the United States. David Garland is an Arthur T. Vanderbilt professor of Law and professor of Sociology at New York University and an honorary professor at Edinburgh University. I'm so glad David's new book has brought him to our program. Welcome, David.
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David Garland
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
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Zalman Neufeld
So, to get started, could you please tell us a little bit about your background and what attracted you to this project?
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David Garland
Okay, so I have a background in law and criminology and sociology more generally. I teach in the law school and also in the sociology department here at nyu, and for many years I've written in the sociology of punishment in criminology. Interestingly, in I guess around about 2018, 2019, I'd put aside work on crime and punishment because I guess I said everything I wanted to say and begun working on a different topic, basically on the development of the idea of the welfare state, particularly in Britain. But in 2020, when there were the massive protests following the killing of George Floyd, and when suddenly conversations about abolition and defunding the police were mainstreamed for a while, and journalists and political representatives were discussing these things. It occurred to me that I would like to reenter the field and to the extent I could kind of explain America's criminal justice system and the kind of the dialectical difficulties of thinking about crime and its control, not least because there's a lot of just straight up, kind of oppositional partisan conversations where people on the left are very concerned, rightly, about over incarceration or about violent policing. People on the right are very concerned about crime and victimization, and they never talk to each other directly. They talk right past each other. So I wanted to engage with the new questions, the radical questions about can we abolish the prison, can we abolish police? But I also wanted to explain why the US system is just so extraordinary, and how can we put up with that for so long?
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Zalman Neufeld
So, stepping back a bit, who was Alexis de Tocqueville and what was the paradox he formulated regarding American society?
- [04:00]
David Garland
So Lexus de Tocqueville was a noble from France who visited the USA in the 1830s, ostensibly to write about American prisons, because they were reforming prisons in France also. But he ended up writing a very important book called Democracy in America, which has often been viewed as being the first real effort to understand American society. And people in high school, sometimes, certainly in university programs, still read Alexis de Tocqueville on America. He formulated a paradox in the 1830s when he was writing about the USA. He said that America is this land of the most extended liberty. He was really struck by the freedom and the liberalism of American society. But if you visit America's prisons, it's a spectacle of the most complete despotism. So he thought that American society juxtaposed this commitment to freedom in general with this real unfreedom and despotism in the penal system. And I introduce the book by saying a lot of people today are still struck by a paradox. How come America, which is the land of liberty, the place where we're supposed to have the most extended democratic freedoms, how come, by comparison with all the other developed countries, America incarcerates many more people? American police kill many more civilians, American criminal justice system seems extensively racist and illiberal. How to make sense of that? And my book is trying to show that actually it's not such a paradox, because despite what America, as it were, tells itself about itself, despite our soothing narratives about who we are and about American exceptionalism, that today America's political economy, that's to say its labor market, its welfare State, particularly, set up poor people to be excluded from the workplace and to be policed by the penal system.
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Zalman Neufeld
We're going to get into all of this in a bit. What is the law and order covenant between American voters and their government?
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David Garland
The reason I use the phrase of a covenant or a compact or a contract. There's a classic book in Western political theory, Western political philosophy, written by Thomas hobbes in the 17th century called Leviathan. And Leviathan was originally, for the biblical scholars out there, was originally a sea monster mentioned in the Book of Job in the Bible. But Thomas Hobbes used the phrase Leviathan to describe the image of a kind of monstrous, authoritarian state. And Hobbes believed that a modern state had been established in Western societies. In England, where he was writing from, he actually wrote an exile in France because there'd been a civil war in England, but he was writing about England. He claimed that the reason that a state emerged with all the powers of a kind of sovereign authority to utilize violence to repress its enemies was in the state of nature. People were afraid of each other. There was no security. There was no guarantee of anything that people behaved like, you know, life was solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short, because basically there was violence of an interpersonal kind. The idea that Hobbes had was that the society, the populace, came together and formed a social contract to create a Leviathan, a state that would protect them from each other, and they gave up their powers to that Leviathan. What I'm claiming in this book is that from the 1960s onwards, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, American voters, time and time again in every region, at every level of government, voted for law and order candidates who promised to give the police more powers to give sentencing courts more powers to send more people to prison and keep them there longer, because Americans were facing levels of violent crime that were just extraordinary by comparison with Canadian or Australian or British or European nations, because this country had a very high crime rate, particularly a very high lethal crime rate. And what I'm suggesting is, what I think is pretty clear is that the consistent and repeated vote by majorities of the American electorate for law and order candidates was really a response to this concern about insecurity and physical safety and criminal violence. Now, in the end, the politics of law and order were often about other things too. They were often about, this is a recipe to impress the voters. It's a recipe for maybe playing the race card and kind of indicating that the civil rights movement's gone too far. Maybe we should reassert the kind of racial hierarchy. It was a way of politicians to apparently give people something when they'd stopped giving them New deal benefits. So there's a whole kind of complex story about law and order politics. But the primary compact, the primary covenant was between Americans who were concerned about their physical safety and maybe also about their property values, since crime rates tend to jeopardize them. In return for their votes, law and order politics extended police powers, more people sent to prison. And that's indeed what we got in the end. Over the period of the 1980s and 1990s, America built an extraordinary penal state that, that incarcerates more people for longer, which utilizes more police powers more violently than any other democratic liberal nation.
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Zalman Neufeld
Yeah, so to go back a bit, you had mentioned that American citizens were experiencing a level of violence and lethal violence that was completely out of, you know, any parallels to other developed countries. Why was that the case? I mean, are Americans more murderous or more violent by nature than people just across the northern border?
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David Garland
Right. So it's not an intrinsic, as it were, genetic characteristic of America. No, but it's explicable, and I try and explain it in the book. So first of all, to have a sense of the comparisons, in the 1980s and again the 1990s, at the time when the American penal state was built, homicides ran to about a rate of 10 per 100,000 people in the USA. Now, what you have to realize that that's about seven to 10 times as high as the homicide rates in Canada or Australia, New Zealand, Britain, any of the western European countries. So American lethal violence rates, armed robbery was the same, were so much higher than all the comparable countries. Now, in a footnote, I should say that if you looked at, say, some South American countries or some African countries, you'd also see very high homicide rates. But compared with other similar nations, the USA was off the charts high. Interestingly, from the 1990s to the present, our homicide rates have declined considerably. We are now around about six per hundred thousand, but that's still three times as high as Canada and six times as high as Europe. Why is this? Well, there's a number of reasons. First of all, the USA has always been a remarkably violent country in which the government, the state, has actually enabled and delegated and permitted the use of violence by private actors. So, for example, settlers on the frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries, managers and owners of slaves and enslaved people in the plantation south, corporations and businesses struggling to suppress the labor movement in the 19th century utilized private forces Utilized violence, utilized guns. And today we see this with immigration, the kind of utilization of ICE violence on the streets. This is an American pattern that's established over a long period of time. Secondly, the USA is remarkable in terms of its gun culture. In this country we have more guns than people. There are something like 400 million guns in circulation with a population of 380 million, 350 million. We also have gun laws which are more permissive than any other developed nation. Basically. If you look at the history of other states in Europe, for example, what you find is that when a government begins to be in control of a whole territory, when it begins to monopolize legitimate violence, it tends to disarm the population. It tends to, as it were, keep violence and the capacity for violence to itself. It in its military and its armories and so on. In the usa, that monopoly of legitimate violence and that disarming of the population never happened after the Civil War or during the Civil war. In the 1860s, all the adult population, all the adult male population in the country were armed and trained to use arms in the war. When the Union and the Confederacy troops were sent home, with the exception of black soldiers, they weren't disarmed. So we had an armed population from the 1860s and 70s onwards. We then developed a manufacturing gun industry which not only sold cheap, reliable, small firearms, but advertised them. You can kind of read about this in the historical literature. Advertised them as like. This is a feature of the American character. We're supposed to be armed. We have the rights in the Constitution to be armed. It's one of the things that Americans should be as gunslingers or people able to control themselves. So there's that background and the presence of guns. But the other final thing I want to emphasize is that in the USA there are neighborhoods which are so heavily concentrated in their impoverishment, so worthless, so lacking in, you know, income support from government, so badly housed, so poorly regulated, that levels of violence in these impoverished neighborhoods are remarkably high. And that's pretty much a consequence of just the background feature of violence in American society, the background availability of guns, but also the exclusion of large numbers of young working class men from work, which means that things like the drug trade become an alternative or stolen goods become an alternative economy. And in that illegal economy, people, often young kids, use violence to sustain it. So we end up being a very violent country, partly historically, partly because of the law permitting guns and partly because of the economic circumstances of the poorest people.
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Zalman Neufeld
Yeah, so you mentioned briefly before the question of race and Racism. I'm wondering if you could speak a little more about that. What role do you think that race and racism play in American crime, policing and punishment?
- [16:14]
David Garland
So that's a very interesting and it's a difficult question in a way. So the heritage of slavery and of Jim Crow in this country has magnified the degree of punishment and policing and its violence. We've always enabled it in these kinds of ways, but by and large it's primarily a class story rather than a race story. That's to say, if you look at whose who's involved in violence, who's involved in violent crime, who's involved in homicides, armed robbery and so on. If you control for social background, if you control for class and circumstance, then there's no difference in terms of the race of the individual offender. It happens that black people, young black men, are much more heavily involved in impoverished communities and in concentrated poverty and therefore more involved in criminal violence. But it's also the case that even if we were to remove all of the colored population, all of the African Americans, particularly from the criminal stats, we would still find that white people are heavily involved in crime and criminal violence to a degree that's just not true in other countries. In other words, our crime problem looks, as it were, disproportionately black, but only because our poverty problem is disproportionately black. So the issue of race is front and center in many circumstances. But race doesn't begin to explain patterns of criminal involvement to the extent that we can think that this is a race problem rather than a class problem.
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Zalman Neufeld
Kay Jeweler's early Black Friday sale is happening now. Get up to 50% off Black Friday deals and up to 40% off everything else. Don't miss this sale. Start your season with savings only at k exclusions apply ck.comexclusions for details. Yeah, and why are the 30 years from the 1960s to the 1990s so significant for the story of mass incarceration in America?
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David Garland
That's a very interesting question. So one I think you see in the period from the 1960s onwards is, is two sorts of things. One is that there actually is an increase in criminal behavior, partly because the shifting forms of control and shifting forms of lifestyle enable crime to rise in a way that didn't previously happen. So in all the countries across the Western world, crime rates rise, even violent crime rates rise from the 1950s through to the 1980s, 1990s. So this is a quite general phenomenon. But by and large, the key thing in the USA that exacerbates this is that in the 1960s and 70s we began to move away from the New Deal arrangements that in this country had extended a welfare state provision to many poor people, had provided social support and housing and better education and better jobs, which really from the 1930s through the 1960s was a way of compressing inequalities and over time was eventually a way of reducing racial differentiations. That New Deal arrangement began to corrode and was eventually swept away in the 1970s and 80s. And you see over the same period of time a shift towards a way of managing working class people, but particularly people who were excluded from work in a much more aggressive penal, punitive way as compared to the New Deal decades from the 30s to the 60s.
- [20:23]
Zalman Neufeld
So in other words, that today, when people, especially maybe non scholars, look at the system of incarceration in America, America, they might think of this as something that has existed at this rate or a similar rate for a very, very long time. But in fact this is really the product of a very particular and relatively recent period in American history.
- [20:49]
David Garland
So. That's exactly right. It is the case that we don't have good data from the 19th century, but through the 20th century, from about 1920 forward, we've got pretty good prison data that includes federal and state and local jails in this country and in other countries. And from the 1920s through to the 1960s and 70s, the US level was always higher than comparable countries, Canada, Britain, European countries, but maybe twice as high. So maybe in other countries there was a rate of 100 per hundred thousand. In this country it was about 200 per hundred thousand. From the 1970s onwards, you see the incarceration rate in this country go up to 750, 760 per hundred thousand, where the European rates are a seventh of that and some Scandinavian countries are a tenth of that. So in the phenomenon I'm describing, the kind of law and order leviathan, the massive use of incarceration and police power to manage the lower orders in this country, that's really a phenomenon from the 70s onwards that was most pronounced in the 80s and 1990s. Yeah.
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Zalman Neufeld
What is the control imperative that runs through the American apparatus of policing and punishment?
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David Garland
So this is interesting. In any criminal justice system in the one that existed in the USA up until the 1970s and 80s, but in the ones that exist in Europe, the ones that exist in Canada, in the Nordic countries and so on, there's a whole series of things that the police and the criminal courts and the penal system try to do. Sometimes they try to reform and rehabilitate people. Sometimes they're organized to levy resources and manage people by imposing fines and so on. In this country, the primary concern has been to impose controls to ensure that the people who come into the view of the criminal justice apparatus, people who are dealt with by the police, people who are prosecuted, people who are sentenced by the criminal court, that the primary concern is to make sure that they are off the streets, that they're controlled and they're made incapable, they're incapacitated, made incapable of committing any further offenses against the honest populace. What that means is that the people in the USA are subjected to much lengthier, more restrictive forms of control, whether that's by probation officers or more importantly, by jails and prisons. The idea is not to think about ways in which you can provide people with support, get them back into work, provide people with help for their drug problems, get them off the streets if they're homeless. None of these welfare concerns shape the American penal system much more. It's control concerns. It's about making sure that people, once they're identified as offenders, are kept off the streets and behind bars. Which is why our prison population is so enormous in comparison to the other countries. Most of the European countries have a rate of about 100 to 120 per 100,000. The Scandinavian countries have a rate of about 70 or 80 per hundred thousand. We had a rate of 750 per 100,000 at its high point in the 1990s.
- [24:32]
Zalman Neufeld
Yeah. So I'm curious just this is sort of a tangent maybe, but I'm curious thinking about American history in general and the influence of religious ideas from the Puritans and others in religious circles. There's all sorts of ideas about redemption, about self perfection or improvement. I'm curious, did any of that historically or do you see any of that still today kind of influencing policies and thinking around prisons? Here are people that, you know, are alleged to have committed a crime, have done, you know, sort of a bad thing. Was there ever a thought that, well, these are people that could be improved. These are people that could be rehabilitated in some way rather than just locked away, surveilled and, and, you know, squeezed for the rest of their life?
- [25:35]
David Garland
No, for sure, that was definitely the case. And indeed it was probably the leading edge ideology of the penal system from the late 18th century all the way through into the 1960s. So basically something like the prison, the penitentiary as it's called. Think of that. The penitentiary is about not just imprisonment, keeping people off the Street. But it's about penitence. It's about getting people to repent for their sins. And indeed, in the late 18th, early 19th century, the penitentiaries in this country were committed to regimes that were intended to make their inmates redeem themselves, to be penitent, to become reformed through incarceration. Now, what that usually meant was that they were either locked in solitary cells and as it were, subjected to religious teachings, or they were made to work either by themselves or in silence together. And the notion was that these penitentiaries would be reformatories, that they would somehow or other grind men honest and turn them out back into the community. Later ON in the 20th century, it was thought that while maybe incarceration is problematic in itself, it concentrates people who are convicted of offenses, maybe makes them, you know, gives them a criminal milieu where they'll learn criminal ways. So in the 20th century, there was a lot of emphasis put on reform outside of the prison. The whole probation supervision project was one about bringing not just penitential ideas and reformatory religious ideas, but eventually social work and psychological and psychiatric ideas to bear upon offenders. All of that being a project to try to reform and improve. And the word eventually became to rehabilitate individual offenders. Now, that ideology, that set of concerns was prominent in the USA in its religious mode in the early 19th century, all the way through into a kind of more medical or social work mode in the 20th century. In the period after the 1960s, that commitment to rehabilitation, commitment to reform, commitment to penitence, that tended to disappear because the concern to control offenders, to impose restrictions to keep them off the streets, that became the dominant concern of the penal system from the 1970s onwards. And I would say that the concern to impose penal control has been the dominant ideology, the dominant kind of system philosophy from the 1980s forward.
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Zalman Neufeld
And why do you think, what do you see as explaining the shift in the sort of ideology or philosophy around the prison system?
- [28:40]
David Garland
Well, that's an interesting thought. I think that in the 1960s and 70s, there was a kind of critique of the prison that came from two sides. One side thought the prison was too repressive, too coercive, was an expensive way of making bad people worse, and that you should be alternatives to prison. On another side thought the person wasn't being tough enough, wasn't extensive enough, wasn't somehow or other doing its job to reduce the crime rate. At that point, some research was done on the impact of rehabilitation and the impact on the treatment of offenders, as if there was something wrong with them, or as if something could be reformed and rehabilitated. And that research tended to kind of show negative findings that basically whatever it was the prison system was doing, whatever the efforts at rehabilitation and treatment that were being made, they weren't working very well. And so that's the finding. How do people respond? Well, one way might be to say, well, we haven't reformed our prisons successfully. We haven't invested enough in rehabilitation. We could do a much better job of treating and caring for offenders. But the actual response that occurred, which was in the 1970s into the 1980s, was, well, rehabilitation and help for offenders. And reform ideas are a complete waste of time. We just need to protect ourselves against these inveterate, irredeemable offenders. And basically that was the movement that occurred in the 1980s. Some important researchers and academics, like, for example, James Q. Wilson, famously wrote about that we haven't discovered any ways to reform and rehabilitate offenders. Nothing works very well. So what we should do is simply remove them from society, incapacitate them, lock them up for long periods of time to keep honest people safe. And that's been pretty much the. The working ideology, the kind of working philosophy of the American penal system in the years since then. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't still probation officers or prison staff or even regimes or reformatories that aim to do something more ambitious, but by and large, the system branding today, and the primary concern is simply to impose controls by removing people from the streets.
- [31:22]
Zalman Neufeld
Right. I get just. I should say that I taught in a college program in prison in New Jersey state prisons for two years after I got my PhD and so maybe I'm especially sort of fascinated by these related questions. So I beg your indulgence. But I'm curious if you see this shift in the thinking around prisons in the 70s and 80s as at least in part an expression of the decline of religious sentiment in relation to the prison system. In other words, the decline of these ideas of penitence and rehabilitation, or is it increase in religious sentiments, but of a different sort? Like, how do you. If you thought about this type of dynamic? Because if you think about it in the 1970s and 80s with, you know, there's a lot of very prominent Christian evangelical voices in American politics, you know, in general, and influencing all sorts of aspects of American national policy. I'm curious if any of this tracks with.
- [32:54]
David Garland
That is interesting. And my own thought about that is, first of all, the position of religious teachers and the various kind of religious sects that there are in the USA with respect to how to think about offenders and how to think about their rehabilitation or the reform or their redemption. These are very diverse and varied. So there are more or less forgiving or more or less punitive positions within the religious terrain. However, what's interesting, I think, is that the character of the penal system in the USA and the whole idea of the treatment and rehabilitation and reform of offenders in our prisons or on probation and parole, I think that that was subjected to a kind of secular shift in the course of the 20th century. And that by and large, the language and the training of people who were part of the reform apparatus, the rehabilitation apparatus, people who worked in probation or parole or who worked in prison reform work that was by and large robbed of its religious character and rendered in a secular mode in the course of the 20th century. So that by the time the skeptics began to study does the prison rehabilitate? They were thinking of a treatment mode rather than a soul transformation. So in many respects, religion with regard to the penal system is in the background rather than the foreground of this story. Now, I don't doubt that the activity, and often the voluntary activity and involvement of religiously committed groups and individuals still has a part to play in our penal system, but it hasn't, I would say, shaped the dominant ideas of the system for a very long time.
- [35:03]
Zalman Neufeld
Very interesting. All right, back to the central focus here. How did America's political economy, in the wake of deindustrialization and the decline of New Deal order, disorganize communities and families and give rise to extraordinary levels of lethal violence? You touched on this before, but if you want to sort of elaborate on that.
- [35:30]
David Garland
Yeah. So it is the case that the homicide levels in this country, which reached a peak of about 10 per 100,000 in the 1980s, then again the 1990s, and saw a period of time when particularly organized drug gangs on the streets were by and large armed and were a source of an enormous amount of street robberies and street violence and intra gang violence and so on, which really moved the homicide level in this country up to levels just never really before seen in late 20th century Western societies. I don't know. I've forgotten the key point of the question that the deindustrialization and so on. I think that the worthlessness that was a feature of young males, young poorly educated males, and of course young black males in this country, particularly living in areas of concentrated poverty, one of the key features of U.S. housing and U.S. local government was just the possibility after kind of desegregation laws were passed in the 1960s of middle class and better off black families moving out of what had previously been black ghettos and moving into suburbs and more integrated communities to the extent that they were able. But what that tended to do was to leave behind areas of concentrated poverty, and areas of concentrated poverty in which large numbers of people were work class, in which large numbers of families were single parent families because men were no longer able to hold down a job and provide a family income, and so on. And from the 1960s onwards, rather than see these neighborhoods and these areas of our cities as being the focus for government attention and funding and intervention and support, by and large, the federal politics and even the state politics, from the 70s onwards, disinvested engaged in a policy of abandonment Rather than a policy of investment and support. So these communities became not just worthless, but also became dangerous and became a site of illegal economies. And when you have an illegal economy, for example, in the management and transport and sale of illegal drugs, then you have to, as it were, manage and safeguard these investments by private violence. You can't rely on the police or the courts to hold up your right to have these goods and to sell them in a peaceable way. You have to provide your own arm system of support for that market. All of that tended to magnify the levels of violence in what was always a rather violent nation, and to intensely focus violence, particularly in the poorest communities. So I talked about the average lens that the national level of violence is something like homicides running at a level of 10 per 100,000. But of course, in the poorest communities, these levels of violence were sky high, because violence isn't evenly spread across the whole social spectrum. It's concentrated in particularly poor neighborhoods. So in these kind of ways, the American deindustrialized high unemployment levels concentrated in poor communities. That was the context in which violent crime really took off.
- [39:20]
Zalman Neufeld
Yeah. I'm reminded of insight from Michelle Alexander's famous book the new Jim Crow, where she argues that race played a very big role in the catalyst for the development of the modern system of mass incarceration in America. But she says in her book that at least part of this has also to do with the question of how local black residents in poor communities responded to the violence, Especially related to the drug trade in their neighborhoods. And where they were not offered, as you said, you know, the welfare support and, you know, institution community development funds and so on, all they were offered was more cops. Do you want to have more police on the street? Do you want more people to be locked up and lacking any other, offer any other options? They basically, according to her, said, yes, things are so desperate here, we'll take the additional cops, knowing full well that that would mean a higher rate of incarceration for their own brothers, sisters, neighbors and so on.
- [40:47]
David Garland
Right. So I think that maybe you're actually combining in your account, the accounts, not just of Michelle Alexander, who by and large sees the use of law and order, the use of the prison and penal control as a kind of substitute for segregation, Jim Crow. I think you're combining her account with that of James Forman, who in many ways is a kind of a supplement to maybe also a critic of Michelle Alexander. And Forman looks at the story of Washington D.C. and Washington D.C. from the 1960s forward, which is primarily a jurisdiction where black people are in the majority and black people are also even in the majority amongst the governing class. And what he sees there in tracing the story of DC over time is the way in which the political activists and indeed leading politicians were keen to address the drug problem and the violence problem with a variety of remedies, including therapy and provision and social work, and then just straight up economic support for poor families. But by and large, none of these solutions were on the table. The only solution that was on the table was penal control through incarceration. And that, in the end, was what Washington D.C. like all the other jurisdictions, embraced. But it was a kind of a problem which in some ways exacerbates the underlying issues. Right, so you can move people off the streets when they're in their early, you know, the late teens or early 20s, and keep them behind bars for 10, 15, 20 years, but you're not addressing the underlying problem. And so, by and large, I think the country has succeeded in reducing crime rates without having solved the underlying social problems that generate them. And having created a different problem, which is a mass incarceration problem where large numbers of people are either warehoused behind bars for like a period of their life course, where they're liable to be involved in crime and released afterwards, but that does nothing whatso to improve the amenities and the work and the social controls that operate in the communities that they're coming from.
- [43:10]
Zalman Neufeld
Right. So say nothing of. Of course, not just the lives of the people who are incarcerated, but the families of the people who are incarcerated who are then completely disrupted and torn asunder and all sorts of really profound ways. Right. Speaking of race, how does economic stratification and racial segregation establish social distance and divisions that limit cross class and cross race solidarity.
- [43:47]
David Garland
So, you know, if, if we were living in a small, more homogenous society where people knew and cared for or felt some shared fate with the people who were getting into trouble with the law and the people were being punished by the courts, we would not be segregating for very long periods of time such a large part of the population. The reason why America is or has been relatively complacent about or even comfortable with a criminal justice system that incarcerates for such a lengthy period of time, so many poor people. The reason is that we don't feel, by and large solidarity with these groups. There is in the usa, some fragmented, some deep social divisions that allow the anathematization, the labeling as dangerous of groups of the population, young black men above all, young poor black men above all. And a sense that, well, if we were simply to segregate them behind bars and keep them there during their high crime years, that would be an acceptable solution. Now to do that is to assume the kind of worthlessness of that population and that it's an acceptable bargain to simply segregate and remove, usually in very poor conditions, large sectors of the population, in order that the rest of us can go about our lives without being hindered by or threatened by or criminalized by, victimized by these groups. We don't think that these people are our kids, these people are our neighbors kids. These people are fellow Americans who, if they're involved in criminal behavior, there's probably a reason to do with our economic arrangements or our social provision. We think, no, these are aliens, these are others, and we can simply remove them and demonize them. The language that accompanied the buildup of the prison, the buildup of sentencing powers, the buildup of police powers in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, it was a very violent language. It was a very othering language. It was a language that talked about the people who end up in prison as if they were from some other race or some other tribe or some other planet and weren't our brothers and sisters and fathers and sons. So I think that whole dynamic has been at the base of America's willingness to live with mass incarceration. And shockingly, that was a story that was rarely told, that was a scandal that was rarely in the public eye until the murder of George Floyd during the pandemic in 2020, when suddenly, for a moment, Americans began to take notice of the criminal justice system, of the policing violence, of the way that we were handling this issue and protested it for a moment.
- [47:08]
Zalman Neufeld
Right. Speaking of which, did The Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by a White police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, have a lasting impact on American thinking about the criminal justice system.
- [47:28]
David Garland
So, you know, Black Lives Matter had been around for a period of time, longer than George Floyd, but basically it brought it. George Floyd's murder during the lockdown, when people were at home and paying attention, was a spectacular bringing to the fore of the Black Lives movement and the people who were involved in that previously. And I think that the George Floyd murder by Derek Chauvin, the police officer who cold bloodedly knelt on his neck until he was dead, it took him eight or nine minutes to do so. This would previously have gone unnoticed. It happened that. And indeed, if you look at the public statement that the Minnesota police officers, the Minnesota police put out following that incident, it was as if there'd been a medical emergency. It was a surprise. The police did everything they could. They got into the hospital, they died there, like nothing to see here. But it happened that the whole incident had been filmed by a teenager on her camera, and it was uploaded and it was suddenly being seen by everyone at home. And it was such, clearly such a shocking, callous lack of concern about this individual's health, safety, life, that it mobilized millions of people around the world and in this country, too. The Black Lives Matter movement radicalized a lot of young people. It also radicalized a political moment in the New York City elections that took place a little while after that. Most of the Democratic candidates were for defunding the police. And we're kind of lining up with rather abolitionist ideas, radical ideas about how we should respond to these events, with the consequence that the person who was elected to mayor was Eric Adams, a police officer who seemed to be more in tune with the kind of concerns that New Yorkers had about their own safety and about the importance of police and the importance of prisons and so on. So the. The 2020 George Floyd moment brought to high visibility problems with the American police, the American criminal justice system. But it did not take long for us to forget about them, because pretty much by the end of that summer, during the later period of the pandemic lockdown, when murder rates began to go up and people began to fear for their safety, the law and order message reasserted itself very forcefully and very effectively, leaving people who'd been associated with defund or abolition looking as if they were out of touch and by and large, having to overcome this because it was a losing proposition in most of the elections subsequently. So the moment of George Floyd's murder and the kind of abolitionists defund the police. Radical breakthrough moment of the summer of 2020, that's left lasting traces. Young people, I think, are radicalized and aware of many of the problems of our criminal justice state, but it's receded to a marginal position in mainstream politics. So, for example, the, the mayor elect in New York City, Mamdani, he now has to, as it were, disassociate himself from defunding positions that he took back in that period of time because they now look unserious and certainly unelectable in any political system that still has a concern about law and order.
- [51:27]
Zalman Neufeld
Very, very, very interesting. So, so where does this all leave us? Meaning, what do you see as the possibilities of a politics that might challenge America's law and order?
- [51:42]
David Garland
LEVIATHAN so, you know, the argument I make in the book is that America's political economy, and particularly our welfare state and our labor market are the big background structural facts that lead us to have high levels of criminal violence and aggressive penal responses to that violence. In other words, it's not likely that the USA will become a nation with low crime levels and low levels of penal control, comparable to Canada, for example, or comparable to the UK or to Western Europe. It's not likely that these things will happen until the American political economy begins to provide people with better jobs and more economic fairness and less inequality and less dislocation of a class sense. So the big picture is that there's very little that can be done to move the USA to where Canada is or where the UK is without structural change in our political economy. Now, last time I checked, there's no very likely scenario in which that structural, economic and political change will occur in the near future. We're not in a kind of radical moment where we're moving to a more egalitarian society. So the question then becomes, okay, what can be done? Are we stuck with the forms of policing and the forms of incarceration that we currently have? And what I say in the book at the in its conclusion is, look, the USA is off to one side of the distribution of other nations being more penal, more violent, more committed to this law and order scenario. Law and order. LEVIATHAN but within the USA there's a bandwidth variation. First of all, the states, you know, range from the highest levels of incarceration and the worst police violence to levels that are much more like European ones. That tends to be, as you go from the south, the southern countries to the northern, from the southern states to the northern states, from The Midwest to the Eastern, the western coast, you see a lot of variation. It's also in terms of crime rates. It's also the case in terms of penal rights. I argue that America has a kind of bandwidth of possibility and that real change, levels of reduced incarceration, levels of reduced police violence, levels of reduced detention of juveniles, levels of reduced disenfranchisement, all former offenders. There's a great deal of possibility within the USA that stop short of being radical change, but still affect thousands and even millions of Americans. In other words, I don't feel that either the system that exists, the status quo or abolition and nothing in between. I think that there's lots of evidence to show that within the American bandwidth there's a possibility for states to move in the direction of becoming more like New Hampshire and Maine and less like Texas and Louisiana. We've seen actually even in New York and New York City and New York State, big swings in terms of levels of incarceration. So for example, in New York City in the 1990s, we had an average prison population of about 22,000 people. Now we've got about 6,000 people in prisons and jails, in jails in New York City. That's a huge shift. And indeed, the levels of incarceration in New York State have also plummeted, and they've done so while levels of safety and crime rates and murder rates have by and large consistently come down. In other words, there's lots of things that can be done to make the American penal state and the American police departments, the 15,000 police departments across the country, to make them less violent and less punitive, without America suddenly becoming Norway or suddenly becoming Canada. In other words, the scope for change and scope for variation within the American bandwidth. Now, I document what these are, and I point to these as kind of sources of potential realistic change within the American political economy as it exists just now. Now, that is not an argument for maintaining our political economy. On the contrary, that political economy, I think, is scandalously unjust and pathological in all sorts of ways. But if the question is what can be done for the criminal legal system in the meantime, the answer is lots of things can be done. And we know this because in some places they have occurred.
- [56:52]
Zalman Neufeld
Right, right. I hear all that. I'm wondering if you could give us an example or two of possible reforms along the lines that you're alluding to.
- [57:02]
David Garland
So we can ensure that the police department of the 15,000 police departments across the country utilize their guns much less frequently and are not permitted or encouraged to shoot first and ask questions later. By and large, police, we haven't talked about this very much in our conversation just now, but every year in the USA, about 1,000 civilians are killed by the police. That's a rate that is astonishingly high by comparison with Canada or Britain or any of the European countries. That level of police killings doesn't need to be tolerated. And we've seen that because places like New York City have succeeded. You know, the police in your city are by no means, you know, a bunch of, you know, peaceniks who deal with the, you know, the population with kid gloves. Nevertheless, the frequency of police killings in New York City have massively reduced over time. And that's because training protocols and accountability protocols are put in place, by and large, that could be done to reduce police violence in this country in a signal way. Similarly, rates of incarceration, as I've just mentioned, in New York, in New York City, in New York State, have been massively reduced over time while the crime rate has continued to come down. The removal of a person's right to vote because they've spent time in prison, the disenfranchisement of former offenders that can be transformed and indeed has been transformed in various states. The levels of detention of juveniles in this country have massively decreased over the last 10 years without impacting levels of crime. In other words, we have overcompensated in our penal system. There's all sorts of ways of pulling back, spending less money, imposing less in the way of punitive consequences on offenders without having big consequences for public safety. So lots of examples within, as it were, the US or the American bandwidth. None of this requires that the U.S. becomes Norway or even Canada. It simply requires that within the range of possibilities that the social structure currently enables, much reform is available.
- [59:32]
Zalman Neufeld
Right, right. Well, there's so much more we could talk about, but we are running out of time. So I want to thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us today.
- [59:41]
David Garland
It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much. Indeed.
- [59:43]
Zalman Neufeld
That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great.