Atheists, agnostics, long-haired widows, short-haired widows, vandal,

hooligans.

I love the government, hug the government, hug the government, love, the government, hug the government,

love the government, hug the government.

Welcome to the politics, guys, a place for bipartisan, rational, and civil debate on

American politics and policy.

I'm Northern Kentucky University political scientist Michael

Barronowski. My guest today is David Garland, the Arthur Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor

of Sociology at New York University. He's the author of multiple books, including the recently

released Law and Order Leviathan, America's extraordinary regime of policing and punishment, which we'll

be discussing today. David Garland, welcome to the show. Thank you. Happy to be here. So I like to

start with titles because authors choose them for a reason, and yours, Leviathan, that doesn't

sound like a nice, friendly sort of thing. So why Leviathan? So the book's topic is that the remarkable,

I'd say, extraordinary American penal state. Basically, our regime of policing and punishment in this

country is much more extensive, much more intensive than any other developed high-income nation.

So what I'm trying to convey with the title is the sense that the American penal state

is like Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, this powerful authoritarian regime that kind of emerges

out of a situation where in the Hobbesanian story, basically, the state of nature is nasty, brutish and short, and people collectively make a social contract and create a state to protect them.

Well, there's some kind of similar processes going on in the USA that the levels of violence,

the level of disorder, concerns about victimization in the 70s, 80s and 90s led to this remarkable penal state,

just like a monstrous leviathan as described by Hobbes.

And I think some people would say or would feel that it's kind of a paradox because

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