Compared to other developed nations, the United States is an extreme outlier in the severity of its criminal legal system. Police in the United States kill civilians at between five and forty times the rate of similarly rich countries, for instance, and the United States imprisons people at about seven times the rate of economically comparable countries. The brunt of this aggressive penal regime is borne of course by poor Americans, particularly poor black Americans.

In Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment, David Garland, a professor of law and sociology at New York University, attempts to explain why the United States takes such a ferocious approach to criminal punishment. For Garland, our exceptionally severe penal state has to be understood in part as a reaction to our similarly exceptional levels of violent crime — themselves the product of America’s “ultraliberal” political economy, the wide availability of firearms, and a long history of devolving violent coercion to private actors.

Jacobin editor Nick French recently sat down with Garland to talk through the arguments of Law and Order Leviathan. They discussed the exceptional nature of the US penal system, the structural roots of America’s high incidence of violence, and the implications of these analyses for efforts at reforming our criminal justice system.