David Garland’s research while affiliated with New York University and other places

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Publications (19)


The Current Crisis of American Criminal Justice: A Structural Analysis
  • Article

September 2022

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68 Reads

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16 Citations

Annual Review of Criminology

David Garland

This review situates the recent, radical challenges to American criminal justice—calls to end mass incarceration, defund the police, and dismantle systemic racism—within the broader social and economic arrangements that make the US system so distinctive and so problematic. It describes the social structures, institutions, and processes that give rise to America's extraordinary penal state—as well as to its extraordinarily high rates of homicide and social disorder—and considers what these portend for the prospect of radical change. It does so by locating American crime and punishment in the structural context of America's (always-already racialized) political economy—a distinctive set of social structures and institutional legacies that render the United States more violent, more disorderly, and more reliant on penal control than any other developed nation. Drawing on a broad range of social science research findings, it argues that this peculiar political economy—a form of capitalism and democratic governance forged on the anvils of slavery and racial segregation and rendered increasingly insecure and exclusionary in the decades following deindustrialization—generates high levels of social disorganization and criminal violence and predisposes state authorities to adopt penal control as the preferred policy response. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 6 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


What’s Wrong with Penal Populism? Politics, the Public, and Criminological Expertise
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

September 2021

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329 Reads

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23 Citations

Asian Journal of Criminology

This article discusses “penal populism” and its conflict with criminological expertise. It considers the proper balance between professional expertise and community sentiment in the formulation of crime control and penal policy—especially in respect of policy measures where moral rather than instrumental considerations are involved. It raises theoretical questions about the nature of “public opinion”—does it exist other than as an artifact of survey instruments?—and its proper role in a democratic polity. And it considers the professional responsibility of criminological experts in relation to policy formation and political debate. The performance of public health experts during the COVID pandemic is presented as an instructive case in point. Can criminology establish itself as a credible form of social scientific knowledge worthy of public trust? And how should criminologists comport themselves when engaging with questions of public policy and political controversy?

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The emergence of the idea of ‘the welfare state’ in British political discourse

August 2021

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68 Reads

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5 Citations

History of the Human Sciences

This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: (a) the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; (b) the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and (c) the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe.


Penalidade e o estado penal

January 2021

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12 Reads

No interior de sociedades democráticas, os limites de atuação do sistema penal sempre provocam intenso debate. O aumento do uso das prisões ao redor do mundo é um dos temas mais espinhosos da atualidade, de forma a demandar respostas que permitam compreender as razões por detrás dessa expansão. Nesse processo, a inter-relação entre democracia e governança penal revela complexos matizes na adoção de modelos de punição e na forma de exercício do controle social formal em diferentes países. Com a presente obra, a análise de diversas regiões permite um amplo esforço comparativo, enquanto também oferece novos métodos e abordagens no estudo desse fenômeno. Ao reunir esses trabalhos, este livro viabiliza caminhos para se discutir a relação entre penalidade e democracia de modo amplo, com a introdução de discussões que ultrapassam a simples atribuição do atual encarceramento em massa ao efeito do punitivismo e do populismo penal. Os artigos aqui reunidos permitem que aspectos estruturais e institucionais de vários contextos democráticos sejam analisados de forma detida e aprofundada, de modo a complementar, quando não subverter, as explicações tradicionais sobre a crise contemporânea do sistema penal. O intuito é, assim, permitir que as discussões sobre esse tema no cenário brasileiro possam incorporar outras perspectivas, refinar os diagnósticos e permitir a elaboração de proposições para melhoria desse campo de atuação estatal.


“Societies under Stress”: Introduction to the Special Issue

September 2020

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8 Reads

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3 Citations

Politics and Society

This introduction to the special issue “Societies under Stress” provides an intellectual context for the four articles that follow. The conferences at which the articles were presented brought together comparative welfare state researchers and scholars who work on crime and punishment to explore the links between social welfare and penal policy, particularly in social settings where neoliberal austerity or rising levels of criminal violence put pressure on these fields of social policy. Participants were drawn from Europe, the United States, and Latin America and represented a variety of social science disciplines and an eclectic mix of research methodologies.


Reading Foucault: An Ongoing Engagement

December 2019

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20 Reads

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2 Citations

Journal of Law and Society

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a major book that has influenced the author. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword, Roger Cotterrell, Nicola Lacey, and Carol J. Greenhouse.


Penal controls and social controls: Toward a theory of American penal exceptionalism

November 2019

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141 Reads

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53 Citations

Punishment and Society

This article argues that to explain American penal exceptionalism, we have to consider America’s exceptional levels of punishment together with America’s exceptional levels of violence and disorder, while understanding both of these as outcomes of America’s distinctive political economy. After specifying the multiple respects in which American penality is a comparative outlier, the article develops a new theorization of modes of penal action that reveals the extent to which the US has come to rely on penal controls rather than other kinds of punishment. This over-reliance on penal controls is viewed as an adaptation to the weakness of non-penal social controls in American communities. These social control deficits are, in turn, attributed to America’s ultra-liberal political economy, which is seen as having detrimental effects for the functioning of families and communities, tending to reduce the effectiveness of informal social controls and to generate high levels of neighborhood disorganization and violence. The same political economy limits the capacity of government to respond to these structurally generated problems using the social policy interventions characteristic of more fully developed welfare states. The result is a marked bias toward the use of penal controls.



Punishment and Welfare revisited

April 2018

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76 Reads

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22 Citations

Punishment and Society

First published in 1985, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies develops a number of themes that continue to animate the research agenda of today’s sociology of punishment. This essay is a revised version of a new Preface written for the 2018 reprint edition of the book that reflects on its findings and method and their relevance in the current conjuncture.


Theoretical advances and problems in the sociology of punishment

January 2018

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216 Reads

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82 Citations

Punishment and Society

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in the extent and range of “punishment and society” scholarship. Together with this quantitative expansion, there have also been important qualitative developments in research, analysis and explanation – many of which can be counted as scientific advances. This article specifies a number of dimensions along which theory, method and data in this field have been improved and also identifies some continuing challenges and problems. Examples from the literature on the emergence of “mass incarceration” and the nature of the “war on drugs” are used to indicate the range of theoretical resources that scholars in this field have developed and to point to empirical and theoretical questions that remain to be resolved.


Citations (15)


... In the field of criminal justice, the rise of private security in Western states has been seen as a 'commodification of security', where some (wealthier) parts of society increasingly rely on the private sector to increase their security, thereby generating rising inequality in the security distribution between social groups (Hope, 2000). More recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to long-standing discrimination and brutality by law enforcement against racial minorities in the United States, with reverberations around the world (Garland, 2023;Logan & Oakley, 2017;Soss & Weaver, 2017). In addition, although first seen as a silver bullet against inequality in criminal justice decision-making (Berk, 2021;Fairfax, 2010), the use of big data and 'smart justice' tools to inform criminal justice decisions has also received substantial criticism (Eubanks, 2018;Tonry, 2019;Zweig et al., 2018), raising the issue of criminal justice systems' unequal treatment of defendants. ...

Reference:

Unequal security
The Current Crisis of American Criminal Justice: A Structural Analysis
  • Citing Article
  • September 2022

Annual Review of Criminology

... Firstly, there is a misconception of the welfare state as the benefactor of the impoverished. 175 In contrast, the welfare state prioritises social insurance and social rights, rendering the chief beneficiaries the middle class and the employed. 176 For example, pensions are generally reserved for the more affluent in some countries, unavailable for the poor. ...

The emergence of the idea of ‘the welfare state’ in British political discourse
  • Citing Article
  • August 2021

History of the Human Sciences

... While in other fields of social science, such as social psychology or behavioral economics, popular books and magazines exist that have popularized key theories and empirical findings (e.g., Kahneman, 2011;Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), there is far less public dissemination in criminology. Moreover, as argued by Garland (2021), criminologists have had limited success entrenching their expertise within public policy discourse. Therefore, it may well be that the general public retain punitive attitudes because they do not know about the lack of scientific evidence for the deterrent effect of punishment for violent crime-and because criminologists have been, so far, comparatively unsuccessful at finding ways to communicate scientific evidence in ways to impact the opinions and decisions of the public. ...

What’s Wrong with Penal Populism? Politics, the Public, and Criminological Expertise

Asian Journal of Criminology

... Si se trata de señalar alguno de los progresos, es importante enfatizar el surgimiento de nuevas líneas de exploración que toman a dicha institución como objeto de indagación específico, analizando a partir de diferentes métodos, datos y marcos teóricos, múltiples prácticas y racionalidades judiciales que años atrás eran simplificadas o, en el peor de los casos, ignoradas (Kostenwein, 2020b). Dicho esto, pueden observarse también ciertos límites en las propuestas de estudio, las cuales en ocasiones suelen vincularse más con intereses de organismos nacionales e internacionales capaces de ofrecer financiación, que con la meta de construir un ámbito sistemático de estudios locales y comparativos sobre el funcionamiento de la justicia penal (Garland, 2019). ...

Avances teóricos y problemas en la sociología del castigo

Delito y Sociedad

... Rather, it allows for periods of national consolidation on some dimensions of state building, while simultaneously facilitating the incomplete establishment-or, at times, the erosion-of national authority on others. The fragmented state may produce muscular criminal legal institutions in response to violence, for example, but partial and constrained ones to limit the use of violence in the first place, such as restraints on the use and proliferation of firearms (see also Garland 2020). In our approach, life-threatening violent crime and the punitive state are interrelated conditions that reflect a limited form of state building. ...

Penal controls and social controls: Toward a theory of American penal exceptionalism
  • Citing Article
  • November 2019

Punishment and Society

... Referring to Michel Foucault and Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1977) as his "productive interlocutors," socio-legal theorist David Garland summarizes his monumental work on conceptualizing punishment in different ways (Garland 2019): punishment as a 3 Criminal Law (Amendment) 2018: In section 376 of the Penal Code,-(a) in sub-section (1), for the words "shall not be less than seven years, but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine", the words "shall not be less than ten years, but which may extend to imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine" shall be substituted; (b) in sub-section (2), clause (i) shall be omitted; (c) after sub-section (2), the following sub-section shall be inserted, namely:-" (3) Whoever, commits rape on a woman under sixteen years of age shall be punished with rigorous imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than twenty years, but which may extend to imprisonment for life, which shall mean imprisonment for the remainder of that person's natural life, and shall also be liable to fine: Provided that such fine shall be just and reasonable to meet the medical expenses and rehabilitation of the victim: Provided further that any fine imposed under this sub-section shall be paid to the victim.". 5. After section 376A of the Penal Code, the following section shall be inserted, namely:-"376AB. ...

Reading Foucault: An Ongoing Engagement
  • Citing Article
  • December 2019

Journal of Law and Society

... On the contrary, the specific emphasis on the different kinds of 'security policies' differs massively and systematically. A rich literature mostly in sociology and criminology has argued that the punishing 'right hand of the state' and the caring 'left hand' of social welfare are strongly related (the distinction goes back to Bourdieu, see Garland, 1985Garland, , 2019Wacquant, 2016). 8 Indeed, there exists a negative empirical relationship between penal measures such as incarceration rates and indicators of welfare state size such as social spending-as shown in studies on the United States (Beckett & Western, 2001;Fording, 2001;Greenberg & West, 2001;Johnson, 1996;Stucky et al., 2005) and cross-national analyses (Downes & Hansen, 2006;Lappi-Seppälä, 2008, 2011Sutton, 2004Sutton, , 2013 9 . ...

Punishment and Welfare revisited
  • Citing Article
  • April 2018

Punishment and Society

... El encarcelamiento masivo se originó aproximadamente en el año 2002, después del gobierno de Alberto Fujimori, coincidiendo con la transición a un régimen democrático 2 , que permitió una mayor 2 Es importante tomar en consideración lo que dice Garland (2016) para explicar el auge del encarcelamiento masivo en Estados Unidos y cuya lógica hace sentido para explicar el aumento de las tasas de encarcelamiento en el Perú: el compromiso central de la democracia es con una forma de gobierno en la que "el pueblo" se gobierna a sí mismo. Y ese compromiso ha dado surgimiento a muchos tipos de gobierno democrático y cada una de estas formas establece un balance diferente entre la voluntad popular -usualmente expresada por la mayoría de los votantes-y otros valores políticos, de modo tal que un régimen democrático en el que se tomen en cuenta a las preferencias de la mayoría y que se incline por valores más punitivos, muy probablemente, tendrá un devenir de la misma naturaleza (pp.41-42). ...

Penalidad y Estado Penal

Delito y Sociedad

... En último término, una agenda de investigación como la planteada podría suponer una notable contribución a la literatura penológica. Estando fuertemente condicionada por los debates anglo-estadounidenses, la literatura en materia de pena y sociedad nació y se desarrolló a partir del análisis del denominado giro punitivo (GARLAND, 2018). Esta circunstancia ha hecho que se haya desatendido el estudio de otras reali- ...

Theoretical advances and problems in the sociology of punishment
  • Citing Article
  • January 2018

Punishment and Society

... Between incarceration and early deaths, African American men are disappearing and missing from society at an alarming rate, the effects of which are experienced beyond the individual in families and communities [43][44][45][46]. In fact, incarceration is a significant driver of inequality that disrupts the social organization, cohesion, and control necessary for communities to address their collective needs and to mobilize resources [47][48][49]. ...

Penal power in America: Forms, functions and foundations
  • Citing Article
  • January 2017

Journal of the British Academy