2024 Kadish Lecture: A Theory of American Penal Exceptionalism Featuring David Garland

The lecture is based on a chapter from Professor Garland’s forthcoming book, Penal Leviathan: The Structural Sources of America’s Penal State. The book uses comparative material to highlight the exceptional characteristics of American-style policing and punishment, showing how these characteristics are rooted in America’s racialized, ultra-liberal political economy and the exceptional levels of social disorder and violence to which it gives rise. The lecture sets out the theoretical framework he uses to connect the macro structures of political economy with the micro-social processes of crime, policing, and punishment.

Featuring David Garland

David Garland is Arthur T Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of several books on the sociology of punishment and, most recently, of The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2016).

Commentator Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law at the University of California, Berkeley.