The United States is a big place, and there’s a lot of variation within it. But in virtually every dimension of the penal state, from policing, through prosecution and sentencing, all the way to prison and collateral consequences, the US is not just at the top of the league — it’s an outlier.

If you look at penal practices in the developed countries — policing, for example — if you think about police violence and the frequency with which police officers kill civilians, there are about a thousand civilians killed a year by police in the United States since we’ve begun to count it. According to [criminologist] Franklin Zimring, that’s almost five times the frequency per capita of Canada, twenty-two times that of Australia, forty times higher than Germany, and more than 140 times the rate of police shooting deaths in England and Wales.

Every police force in the developed world uses stop and search, or “stop and frisk,” as we call it here. But nowhere else do you get mass stop and frisk, where, as in New York City, under Ray Kelly’s commissionership, there were about 680,000 people stopped per year. That is an unheard-of level of harassment of, typically, black youth.

If you look at sentencing, the US has a number of punishments — the death penalty, life imprisonment without prospect of parole — which in all European nations have been long since abolished and prohibited by the European Convention on Human Rights. We also sentence people more frequently to incarceration, and we sentence them there for longer periods.

The result is that the prison population in this country reached a peak of 760 per 100,000 in 2008. The European average is a bit more than 100 per 100,000; Canada has fewer than 100 per 100,000. In other words, on a per capita basis, seven times as many people are incarcerated in this country as compared to elsewhere.

Then if you think about the afterlife of people who’ve been convicted of a felony, we have all these collateral consequences, like a criminal record that is public and commercially available. You can go on the internet and pay $20 and find out anyone’s criminal rap sheet. That criminal record lasts pretty much forever. In other countries, that information is not public. It’s only available to the criminal justice system officials, and even then it’s time-limited.

Similarly, we disenfranchise felons, depriving them of a vote, in every state apart from Vermont, New Hampshire, and DC. Again, that’s not a practice you find elsewhere.

Recently, all of the states in the US have begun to impose fees and charges and costs on offenders and their families: people now have to pay for staying in prison as if they’re guests in a hotel. Or if they’re on probation instead of being sent to jail, they have to pay for the probation supervision, or they have to pay for a urine test. In one police department in Missouri, offenders who have been tasered have to pay $25 toward the cost of using the taser.

It’s an extraordinary set of arrangements that have emerged in this country, and we tend to take it for granted. The moment when we stopped taking it for granted was very brief. In the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd was viewed by everyone on that video, and then the Black Lives Matter movement bringing people to protest — first that murder and then eventually mass incarceration, racist policing, and so on. There was a moment there when American consciousness was raised and was made to attend to this issue.

But by and large, this massive penal state just exists in the background of our lives like a normal feature of social organization. What I wanted to do in this book was emphasize the extent to which all of this is extraordinary when you compare the United States with any other developed high-income nation. If you compare it with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western European countries . . . with respect to all of these, it’s just off-the-charts extraordinary.

I do describe how rising rates of violence, crime, and disorder from the 1960s onward was one of the causes that led to the development of the kind of aggressive policing and punishment we see. It’s obviously not the whole story, and there’s a lot to do with political representation, a lot to do with the formulation of strategies around the crime issue, the race issue, and so on. But there’s no question in my mind that the rising rates of homicide and armed robbery in this country from the ’60s onward prompted public fears and public concerns, brought political attention to these concerns, and eventually gave rise to a law-and-order politics.

We need to also bear in mind that the United States is a remarkably violent society, again, in comparison to the developed world. Not in comparison to, say, South American nations. If you go to Brazil, Argentina, or Guatemala, there are higher homicide rates. But if the United States is being compared with other Western nations, the level of homicide in this country is again an outlier.

In the 1990s — 1994 was the peak year — the number of homicides was almost ten per 100,000. In most European countries, it’s one or 1.5 per 100,000 of the population. In other words, the homicide rate in the United States is almost ten times as high as that of Western European nations. The US homicide rate has fallen considerably since that peak in the 1990s. It’s now near six per 100,000, but that’s still six times as high as European nations — and more than three times higher than Canada.

So America is an extraordinarily dangerous place to live; it’s a lethally violent place to live. We also have rates of armed robbery that are way higher than everywhere else.

Of course, much of this is a story about guns. The number of homicides committed with firearms is way higher than everywhere else in the developed world. But even if you remove firearm homicides and look simply at homicides committed by other methods — by poisoning, by fists, by knives — the rate, at 2.9 per 100,000, is still twice as high as the European level. This is a country that is more violent, the lethality of which is hugely amplified by the availability of guns.

Guns play a big part in the explanation I develop in the book. In this country, something like 30 percent of the population has a firearm; something like 40 percent of the population lives in a household where there are firearms. The equivalent figure all across the European countries is 5 percent or fewer. Basically, we live in a society that is much more violent and in a society where guns are much more plentiful.

Why is it more violent? That’s a complicated and interesting story. I try to explain it with a series of overlapping analyses.

First, there’s a historical story. This country, from the beginning, has engaged in government-sponsored violence: on the frontier against American Indians; as a normal part of slavery by plantation managers, as a feature of Jim Crow and segregation in the South — not just lynching but the everyday violence against blacks in the South and indeed in the North; lethal violence using private police forces — sometimes state militia, sometimes federal forces — against the labor movement by corporations; and violence used to put down protests.

All of that is a legacy of violent conduct and its toleration in this country. In addition to which, the absence of police protection in black neighborhoods, right up until the 1960s civil rights movement, meant that violence was a part of self-help in black neighborhoods for the longest time.

You have that history. Then the key story that I tell in the book — and this is where political economy impacts communities with criminogenic consequences — is that we have in this country some of the most immiserated, disadvantaged neighborhoods of any developed country. We have segregated, cumulatively disadvantaged communities, in which there’s been long-term joblessness, in which youth are chronically unemployed, in which housing is terrible and income support is absent — apart from women with dependent children, and even then, it’s miserable. Very poor housing, very poor schools, nothing in the way of work.

In these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that many stressed-out families are not capable of supervising their adolescent children. It’s not that surprising that young men end up in illegal economies, in drugs and burglary and armed robbery and so on; it’s not surprising that street gangs form, and that levels of violence in these communities are amplified by the conditions of life there.

I talked before about the homicide levels in this country being very high. But homicide is concentrated in the poorest places. About 6 percent of the zip codes in this country account for about half of the homicides. And most of the people who are being killed are poor and black people. The leading cause of death for black, non-Hispanic men in the age groups one to nineteen and twenty to forty-four is homicide.

For historical reasons, having to do with the failure of the US state to disarm the population, the deployment and devolution of coercive functions to private actors, and now, because of the disorganization of communities and families, we have a higher level of violence than elsewhere. And we amplify the consequences of that by saturating the social landscape with guns.

Violent crime is not the whole of the crime story. There’s a lot of crime committed by well-to-do corporate and white-collar criminals that doesn’t attract much attention. So you have to think in terms of selective criminalization, the targeted deployment of law enforcement resources, and so on.

But everywhere in the world, penal power, such as the use of policing and punishment by the authorities, is always directed downward. It’s always targeted at poor people, pretty much in every developed country. If you look at Australian numbers, British numbers, Canadian numbers, German numbers — the French don’t provide racial statistics, but if you look closely at who’s in the prisons — pretty much everywhere concentrates penal power on racialized minorities as well.

It’s not only the United States’ prison system that locks up disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latino men. It’s also the case in other places. In France, North African immigrants; in Germany, migrant workers; in Australia, Aboriginal people; in Canada, First Nations people — all of these groups are more often incarcerated, because they’re stigmatized, lower class, and excluded minorities.

So we know that it’s a general feature of penal states and penal power that they are directed downward against the poor and against stigmatized ethnic minorities. That’s sometimes where most of the crime is, but in most states it’s also where most of the enforcement effort is.

An important part of the story is that young black men — from poor, disorganized neighborhoods — are more involved in homicides and criminal violence than is proportionate to their part of the population. They’re also more involved in victimization. The biggest victim groups are also the same as the biggest perpetrator groups. (In those rare cases where whites experience similarly adverse socioeconomic conditions, their rates of violence are also elevated. The effect is racially invariant.)

But when you look at other kinds of crime — if you look at, for example, the use of banned substances and illegal drugs — then most of the information that we have about illegal drug use is that ethnic and racial groups engage in this pretty much at the same level as each other. Yet law enforcement during the “war on drugs” from the 1980s into the ’90s heavily targeted poor black people. There’s a massive disproportion in the number of people of color who were incarcerated for being involved in the drug economy, for possession and sale of drugs.

That has been scaled back since the late 1990s. This is a scandal, and as it became more and more apparent, there was less emphasis by prosecutors and judges and police forces on punishing drug offenders.

As a consequence, the disparities of race have lessened in the prison. It used to be the case that African American men were eight-to-one more likely to be in prison compared to white men. Now it’s five to one. It’s still scandalous, but it’s less so than it used to be.

So there are different levels of involvement in crime, especially with respect to violent crime. But there are also different kinds of enforcement that pick on people in high-crime neighborhoods, people on the streets in communities of color. Police respond to crime complaints and are drawn to high-crime communities. That’s often where poor black people live, although less visible crime is spread across the social landscape more generally.

Also, prosecutors, sentencers, and parole officers are often biased in their assumptions about who will be law-abiding, who will be a flight risk, who will be a danger to public safety, and so on. But much of the disparity comes from different levels of criminal involvement in violence or different levels of law enforcement around drugs.

There are a number of reasons. First of all, in the 1980s, when law and order first became a winning political strategy for Republicans and, after a while, was embraced by Democrats, the parties would outbid each other in terms of who could pass the most draconian penal statutes, have new federal death penalties, or give more power to the police.

And during that period, the New Deal order and the welfare state politics that defined it were disintegrating. From the 1980s onward was a time when neoliberal ideas and policies were replacing New Deal ones.

The idea that we would respond to social problems by investing in communities, with federal funding for urban centers, by providing jobs or social workers, psychiatrists, or medical care, and so on — that had already been taken off the table as the old politics. What we were looking for was a means of responding to [crime] that was not redistributive, not transferring from taxpayers to the needy, but that instead took some other form.

Second, responsibility for public safety in this country is delegated to local government, city government, and county government. Not the states but the municipalities are responsible for police, courts, and jails.

In this country, particularly in the neoliberal era, the local state simply doesn’t have the capacity or resources to invest in communities and provide housing, schools, jobs, income support, health care services, and so on. What it does have is police and jails, and states have prisons.

In a context where there are limitations of local state capacity to provide social responses to crime, you get law and order, policing and punishment responses. The politics of the day, together with the state capacity background, mean that it’s always going to be much more likely that the police and the punishment are the first resort, rather than long-term investments in communities, work, families, income support, and jobs.

Why, though, are US policing and punishment so aggressive? Why are they so focused on control? Why are police so aggressive in dealing with young men and the public on the streets of communities of color? Why is it the case that sentencers so frequently lock people up and keep them there for long periods of time?

The answer to that has to do with the fact that, in this country, criminal justice and crime control operate against a much more disorganized and dangerous background. In other words, when a police officer thinks, who is this person I just stopped in the street, and what’s he liable to do? That person, the police officer must think, might be armed. This person that I’ve just pulled over in a car on the highway to see why they’re driving erratically might have a gun in the glove compartment.

That thought is not present for a police officer in Britain or France or Germany or the Netherlands, or even Canada. Because guns just aren’t a fact in the landscape to anything like the same degree.

Second, in these other countries I’ve just named, there are better levels of informal social control, better functioning of families and communities, and, most important, provision of social services, like psychiatric or mental health services, health care, housing, social work, and so on. All of these things mean that when people are experiencing mental health problems, housing problems, drug addiction problems, there are services that they can call upon that are typically free to people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

In this country, these services just don’t exist for poor people. As a consequence, when a prosecutor or a judge thinks about a person who has just been brought to the court and charged with some offense, can I allow them to go home? The thought is, well, what does home look like? Do they have a job? No. What kind of neighborhood is this? This is a high-crime neighborhood. What likelihood is there that this person might do the same thing again?

The background social circumstances are materially different here compared with elsewhere. As a result, police officers, judges, and parole boards are much more risk-averse. They’re much less willing to take a chance that we’ll allow this person to return home and they’ll be taken care of, there will be no trouble and no problem for public safety — that they will show up in court when the time comes. There’s much more of a sense that these people are risky, these people are dangerous, these people are “other,” and these people have to be controlled.

I would say that mentality — whereby everything must be done to control anyone who presents themselves as risky, as an offender, as dangerous — is reinforced by the public’s attitudes. If a judge releases someone and that person subsequently reoffends, what kind of headline does that cause? If some governor introduces a furlough policy or a policy of early release and someone gets out, as they will, and commits another crime, what kind of headline does that cause? What kind of political future does that governor have?

In this country, all of the incentives are to lock people up and keep them off the streets. And because the public doesn’t care about poor black people, and because poor black people aren’t organized and have very little political representation — except for a month in the summer of 2020 — the public shrugs and says, “If they didn’t want to do the time, they shouldn’t have done the crime.”

We don’t think that we’re doing something extraordinary in this country in the way that we police and punish. But we undoubtedly are when you begin to look at this comparatively.

In a way, this is the guts of the book.

First, the story I’m telling is about political economy, not just the welfare state. A major part of the story is about how the labor market in this country provides fewer protections and less provision for working people than pretty much any of the other developed countries do, in terms of workers’ rights, trade union rights to organize, the provision of decent wages, and the security of tenure for people who are in employment. We have a much more precarious, more flexible labor market, with the consequence that working people in this country are much more insecure than is the case elsewhere. And their income is much less stable over time.

It’s not just poor people in this country that are impacted by our extraordinary political economy. Working people of all kinds, even middle-class, college-educated people now, are facing real economic insecurity. And that makes a difference for how they think about crime in their neighborhood; how they think about their property values, if they’re lucky enough to be a homeowner; and the impact that crime might have on that.

The story I’m telling is not just about the welfare state but about the labor market and the welfare state together. Political economy impacts levels of family formation and the capacity of communities to control young people, socialize them, and integrate them.

Second, I argue, and I think I show, that the reason why the US has such high levels of violence and such an aggressive use of penal power — such a massive penal Leviathan — is that the political economy and the social structures of this country are just different from those of other Western capitalist nations.

You might think it follows that unless you change these political-economic structures, unless you restructure the labor market and rebuild the welfare state, nothing can happen at the level of crime and policing. That’s not what I’m saying. The reason it’s not is that the macro forces of political economy impact criminal behavior and policing and punishment only indirectly, through community-level processes.

In other words, political economy affects the prospects of people being employed or having political resources provided to their neighborhoods and communities, but these neighborhoods and communities have their own dynamics that are relatively autonomous and relatively independent. They are affected by these outside, large-scale political and economic forces, but they have their own character and dynamics and resilience.

There are some neighborhoods that can withstand periods of unemployment and periods of government when there’s less investment, less social services. They still have a capacity to be collectively efficacious, they’re still organized, people know how take care of each other, people are on the streets supervising the behavior of youth, and so on.

Some neighborhoods have social capital of their own, which is relatively resilient, even in the face of changes in the political economy. Other neighborhoods, particularly ones where everybody’s poor, where they’re segregated and separated from employment prospects, where there’s a lot of transient housing, and where there’s a lot of crime — these neighborhoods are much less able to manage macroeconomic impacts and challenges.

Political and community responses to the problems of crime, violence, or drugs vary across space too. In some places, there are powerful community actors, there are nongovernmental organizations, there are churches, there are collective organizations of residents that take self-governing steps to deal with the problems in the neighborhood and are pretty effective at doing so. [Sociologist and criminologist] Patrick Sharkey has shown that neighborhoods that saw community action and nongovernmental interventions in questions of violence had the biggest drops in homicide and armed robbery of all the neighborhoods [he studied].

In other words, community action at the level of the neighborhood makes a difference for outcomes, just like the capacity of families or particular residential blocks or neighborhoods to resist the challenges that come from the macroeconomy. They vary across time. They vary in terms of social indicators: in terms of transience, in terms of housing, in terms of repair, in terms of what the background levels of crime are. All of these things make a difference for the outcome.

These community-level variables, if you look at them across the nation, show that even when there’s no big structural change in America’s neoliberal, racialized political economy, certain things can be done that reduce, for example, the level of police harassment of youth, or the frequency with which police shoot or kill civilians — or levels of homicide or levels of incarceration.

How do I know that? Because if you look at New York City and New York State, we succeeded in massively reducing the number of stop and searches because of a court order — drastically reducing the number of occasions when police officers shot at and killed civilians. In the 1970s, there were about eighty or ninety civilians killed every year by the police in New York City. Now it’s about eight or nine civilians killed each year, and that has to do with training, accountability, selection, and practices in the police force. In other words, you can do local things that make a difference to police violence.

Similarly in New York City, we’ve seen quite massive reductions in the number of people sent to jail. At its highest point, fifteen years ago, there were about 21,000 people on Rikers Island. Now there are about six thousand. During that time, crime rates have continued to go down.

Even the best cities and states in the US never look anything like Canada or Britain, let alone the Nordic countries or Northern European countries. But within the American range of variation, there’s a lot of movement, and there’s a lot of possibility. If every state got to the level of incarceration and level of homicide that, say, New York City has gotten to, that would be a big change.

Similarly, some states have begun to re-enfranchise people who’ve had felony convictions. Some states have begun to use solitary confinement less frequently than they previously did. Police forces in some places are becoming more accountable to local community action. There are a whole bunch of things that can be done that fall way short of structural change at the level of the economy but still positively impact the lives of hundreds and thousands, and sometimes even millions, of people.

My claim is that without structural change at the level of political economy, America’s penal state will never look like that of Canada or Britain, let alone that of the Nordic countries. But within the American bandwidth, there’s a lot of variation and possibility for progressive, important change.

All of what I’ve just said violates some of the premises of the people who believe in institutional abolition. Though in practice abolitionists typically support certain reforms, their official position is that, ultimately, police and prison must be abolished. What we have to do is abolish the whole system.

That kind of counsel of despair is understandable when one looks at the data. Your head explodes at how terrible the penal state looks. The notion that this is so terrible, we have to begin again somehow — I understand that. That’s a totally understandable reaction to the ongoing slow tragedy of America’s repressive penal state.

However, it seems to me utterly unrealistic to suppose that we’re going to, in any medium or long term, abolish policing or abolish incarceration. Why do I think it’s unrealistic? Basically, no modern developed country has existed without policing, without the prison, since the early nineteenth century.

First, if we’re going to have criminal law, and people break the law — and that’s what happens when groups live together — then there’s going to be enforcement, and that enforcement has to ultimately have coercive capacity. That’s what police are. You can call them a different name. We could hugely improve policing in this country in all the ways I’ve described, but you’re still going to need police.

If you remove police, the first people to suffer would be poor people. Basically, rich people would have their own private police; they already do. If we abolish the public police, it would impact rich people, but it wouldn’t be devastating for them. It would be an existential disaster for poor people. Because crime would continue to exist — we simply wouldn’t have tax-funded protection that police provide, however poorly they provide it today.

Similarly, prisons exist even in peaceable, highly developed, highly egalitarian societies like Norway and Sweden. They have about a tenth of the incarceration rate we do, but they still have incarceration. Because ultimately, in any criminal system, you need measures that deal with noncompliant offenders.

Often you hear people say, “We need the prison because Hannibal Lecter is out there and dangerous.” That’s not the reason to have the prison. The reason to have the prison is basically that most penal sanctions — fines, community sanctions, probation, supervision — rely on the cooperation and compliance of the offender. The offender’s going to show up and take part in the program, or come to the court and pay their fine, or attend the supervision.

If they decide not to comply, what do you do? Either you say, “You don’t want to comply? That’s fine; it was just a suggestion.” Or, realistically, you say, “This is the law. You have to comply, and we will enforce compliance.” How will we do that? We no longer use corporal punishment; we no longer use the death penalty; we no longer use banishment routinely. What we’ve all, as modern societies, come to use is confinement and incarceration.

We can do that in a variety of better and worse ways; we can do it to a greater or lesser extent. Obviously the United States is doing it in ways that are utterly unacceptable. But the idea of doing without prison is something else entirely. The prison is a feature of modern society that has a whole bunch of explanations and reasons for its existence. The problem with the United States is not that it has prisons; it’s that it has terrible prisons that are way overused and impose lengthy sentences for way too many people in conditions of confinement that are altogether intolerable.