Article

Punishment & Society

2018, Vol. 20(1) 8–33
Theoretical advances and ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474517737274
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David Garland
New York University, USA

Abstract
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.

Keywords
history, sociology, punishment, theory, mass incarceration, war on drugs

Sociological studies of punishment have been around for a long time, starting in the
1890s with the work of Emile Durkheim, and earlier still if we include the writings of De
Tocqueville or Montesquieu. But it is only in the last 20 or 30 years that the sociology
of punishment has emerged as an organized field of study and Punishment & Society
has played a central role in that development.1 In the essay that follows, I use the
occasion of the journal’s 20th anniversary to reflect on the ways in which the field has
developed in the last two decades, highlighting theoretical and methodological advan-
ces that have been made and detailing some problems that still need to be addressed.

Corresponding author:
David Garland, New York University, 40 Washington Square South, 340 Vanderbilt Hall, New York 10012,
USA.
Email: David.Garland@nyu.edu
Garland 9

The years between 1999 and 2018 saw a remarkable increase in the extent and
range of “punishment and society” scholarship. The movement of new scholars
into the field was partly a reaction to real-world developments and a new deploy-
ment of penal power that shifted penal issues closer to the forefront of social and
political life. But it was also fostered by the subject’s ability to combine intellectual
depth and challenging research questions with the promise of political and social
relevance. Precisely because the sociology of punishment was a newly emerging
field of study, it offered researchers the possibility of investigating large, relatively
unexplored questions and making empirical and theoretical contributions of a
fundamental kind. The result is that “punishment and society” has become, in
the course of a single generation, a rapidly expanding, highly productive field
that attracts increasing numbers of scholars from a range of different disciplines.
Research in this field is also increasingly integrated into the intellectual concerns
of the broader disciplines, with the result that “punishment and society” research-
ers more often approach their topics as specific cases of some larger phenomenon,
rather than a sui generis matter for penological specialists. Mass incarceration, the
penal state, felon disfranchisement, and the over-incarceration of racial minorities
are nowadays discussed as instructive cases of social stratification, state formation,
democratic citizenship, or racial ordering and “punishment and society” scholar-
ship is increasingly being published in the leading generalist journals in sociology,
history, law, and political science (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Goodman,
2014; Gottschalk, 2014; Savelsberg, 1994; Western and Beckett, 1999).
Along with the expansion of punishment and society scholarship came a certain
normalization of the field as it developed the characteristic attributes of an estab-
lished academic subject area. “Punishment and society” has come to be institu-
tionalized in textbooks, college courses, peer-reviewed journals, conference
sections, membership associations, and academic appointments. The young aca-
demics now publishing their first books were trained in an already-existing field of
graduate study—a formative experience that, for better or worse, was simply not
available to their supervisors a generation ago. The result is a new wave of schol-
arship that is perhaps less ground-breaking in character but is more theoretically
sophisticated, more methodologically mature, and more impressive in the consis-
tency and range of its contributions. If the scholars and researchers of my gener-
ation laid the foundations for a “punishment and society” enterprise in the 1980s
and 1990s, the consolidation and extension of that project has been the work of a
better-trained successor generation.
In simple numerical terms, there has certainly been an increase in the volume of
books, reports, articles, and reviews that address “punishment and society” ques-
tions. But along with this quantitative expansion, there have also been important
qualitative changes in sociology of punishment research, many of which must be
counted as scholarly or scientific advances. In this essay, I describe some of these
advances and point to some continuing problems, focusing particularly on ques-
tions of historical analysis and sociological theorizing—the areas of “punishment
and society” with which I am most familiar. Examples from the literature that
10 Punishment & Society 20(1)

deals with the emergence and distinctive character of contemporary American

penality—often referred to as “mass incarceration”—will be used to indicate the
range of explanatory resources that scholars in this field have developed and to
point to empirical and theoretical questions that remain to be resolved.

Advances
There seems little doubt that, as a general matter, punishment and society schol-
arship has made considerable intellectual progress, becoming more systematic in
its methods, more consistent in its use of data, more theory-driven in its research,
and increasingly historical and comparative in approach. But what specifically has
changed? And which of these changes constitutes an intellectual advance? Consider
the following observations:2

There has been a shift of historical attention, from the emergence

of the modern prison in the early 19th to the penal transformations
of the late 20th century
Much punishment and society scholarship is contemporary in its focus but a sig-
nificant minority of work is done by historians and historically oriented sociolo-
gists. A recurring historical focus of “punishment and society” scholarship in the
1970s and 1980s was the birth of the prison and the most important theoretical
debates centered upon competing accounts of the late 18th and early 19th century
shift to a more carceral penality (c/f Durkheim, 1900/1973; Fine et al., 1979;
Foucault, 1977; Ignatieff, 1978; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981; Rusche and
Kirchheimer, 1968; Spierenburg, 1984, 1991). The development of the penitentiary
in early 19th-century Europe and America was variously interpreted as an effect of
the emergence of modernity, of modern capitalism, of disciplinary power, or
of civilized sensibilities. An important aim of that work was theoretical, with his-
torical claims serving the cause of larger explanatory frameworks. And although
some of these theories were read as having a measure of contemporary political
resonance, little of that work was directly concerned with developments in con-
temporary penality. The same was true of historical work on the 18th-century
death penalty that appeared in these years and which, like the early prison studies,
served as an inspiration for the emerging sociology of punishment (Hay et al.,
1975; Laqueur, 1989; McGowan, 1987; Spierenberg, 1984; Thompson, 1975).
Today, the focus of historical attention has shifted. The preponderance of his-
torical work now focuses on the late 20th century and the transformations of
penality that occurred in the decades after the 1960s (Campbell and Schoenfeld,
2013; Forman, 2017; Garland, 2001; Thompson, 2010; Hinton, 2016; Kohler-
Hausmann, 2017; Murakawa, 2014).3 These historical studies also exhibit theoret-
ical commitments but their analytic aims are less concerned with advancing a
general interpretive framework and more interested in making an intervention in
the present by identifying the historical roots of our current situation.
Garland 11

Contemporary history and critical histories of the present have become a dominant
current.4 This shift of focus does not, in itself constitute a theoretical advance; and
insofar as some work of this kind comes close to being a Whig history in reverse,
projecting contemporary politics and meaning back into the past, it can be meth-
odologically problematic (Garland, 2016). But to the extent that these historical
studies highlight the complex paths and struggles out of which the present
emerged, they extend the empirical basis for sociological theorizing and encourage
a greater attention to detail, to variation and to contingency in the development
of general explanatory accounts (see Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Goodman
et al., 2017).

From description and classification to explanation and interpretation

In the first phase of punishment and society scholarship, a considerable amount of
work took the form of a descriptive sociology that concerned itself with the iden-
tification of penal trends and policy patterns. The best of this work scanned the
horizon, observed emerging trends, and pointed to future prospects: as with Stan
Cohen’s analysis of community corrections (Cohen, 1985) or Feeley and Simon’s
account of “the New Penology” (Feeley and Simon, 1992).5 Other less original
studies focused on trends and themes that had been identified by others as theo-
retically significant—the spread of discipline and normalization; the emergence of
a new penology and actuarial justice; the influence of managerialism; examples of
the culture of control, neoliberal penality, strategies of “governing through crime”
and so on—and proceeded to document their appearance or else to show how they
appeared in variant or modified forms. The aim of this kind of study was chiefly
the description and classification of penal policy and practice. In recent years,
descriptive work of this kind has become less prominent, displaced in the leading
journals by more ambitious articles aiming at interpretive understanding,
causal explanation and theory development (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013).
A largely descriptive sociology of punishment has begun to give way to a more
analytical one.

From general theory to theorizing in the middle range

Early work in the field explored how theoretical frameworks developed by Marx,
Durkheim, Weber, Elias, and Foucault enabled us to conceptualize, in a very
general way, the social determinants, institutional forms, and social functions of
punishment—and to theorize the evolving relations between punishment and soci-
ety (Garland and Young, 1983; Garland, 1990). More recent theorizing operates at
a less abstract, general level, focusing with greater specificity on particular effects
and specific cases (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Goodman et al., 2017;
Whitman, 2003).6 Thirty years ago, when Punishment and Modern Society
(Garland, 1990) was originally published, its aim was to provide the emerging
field with a tool kit of general theories and sociological orientations. A book
12 Punishment & Society 20(1)

with similar ambitions, written today, would likely be much more case- and place-
specific, more comparative, and more middle range in its theorizing.
With occasional exceptions—such as Phillip Smith’s attempt to rethink the
sociology of punishment through a neo-Durkheimian lens (Garland, 2009;
Smith, 2008)—contemporary theorizing addresses more closely specified, middle-
range phenomena. The result is that today’s theoretical debates are more focused
and more particular. They argue over the penal implications of neoliberalism
(Abbott, 2011; Wacquant, 2009); the analytical power of the “New Jim Crow”
(Alexander, 2010; Forman, 2012); or the character of American or Scandinavian
exceptionalism (Pratt, 2008; Reitz, 2017; Scharff-Smith and Ugelvik, 2017); not
about the relationship between punishment and social structure broadly conceived.
General theory has not disappeared—it continues to orient enquiry and to sensitize
analysts to recurring relationships and overarching structures. And the works of
Pierre Bourdieu and Giorgio Agamben have been added to the repertoire (Page,
2011, 2012; Spencer, 2009). But general theory is no longer expected to do the fine-
grained analytical work required for the explanation of specific penal practices and
institutions.7

Improvements of theory and method

The sociology of punishment is becoming more analytical: that is to say, more
concerned to identify participating actors and constitutive actions; to specify the
interests, incentives, and opportunities that enable action; to relate patterned,
recurring actions to structures and their reproduction or transformation; and to
trace the causal processes and operative mechanisms that generate penal out-
comes.8 And while broad functionalist claims are still prominent, particularly
in popular, polemical works (Alexander, 2010; Wacquant, 2009) and writers occa-
sionally refer to punishment’s “social functions” as if they serve society as a
whole—more care is now taken to distinguish intended and unintended effects;
to separate original causes and subsequent functioning; to identify the range of
actors and interests whose actions constitute the functional practice; and to dis-
tinguish the various groups and time periods for which the practice generate func-
tional and dysfunctional consequences (c/f Merton, 1996a).
Similarly, interpretive accounts that describe the meaning of penal practices are
less prone to talk in the singular about “the meaning” and more sensitized to the
different meanings that such practices have for different groups and to the ways
in which these meanings are contested and change over time (Garland, 2006;
Smith, 2008).
As a result of such work, scholars have been able to identify sociological effects
and processes that are characteristic of penal systems: effects such as “net-
widening” (Cohen, 1985), “the process is punishment” (Feeley, 1979; Kohler-
Hausmann, 2015); the accumulation of penal disadvantage (Western, 2006); and
the transmission of public pressure into penal policy (Savelsberg, 1994).
Garland 13

Well-documented, recurring effects of this kind, together with an understanding of

the actions and mechanisms involved, are a hallmark of a mature area of study.

Increased quantification
In recent years, the field has begun to attract scholars with highly developed quan-
titative skills who utilize sophisticated statistical techniques and who develop
and analyze large data sets (e.g. Manza and Uggens, 2006; Raphael and Stoll,
2013; Sutton, 2004; Travis et al., 2014; Western, 2006). The result has been an
improvement in the precision of empirical claims and in the analysis of the avail-
able data. But better quantification has also led to the development of theoretical
insights and the opening of new lines of inquiry. We now know much more about
the life-time effects of imprisonment on offenders and their families; about the
impact of a criminal record on life course events (marriage, employment, family
formation, health, etc.); and on the role that mass imprisonment plays in social
stratification and in labor markets (Western, 2006; Wakefield, 2010). Similarly,
Manza and Uggens (2006) transformed our understanding of the phenomenon
of felon disfranchisement when they demonstrated statistically that Florida’s mas-
sive exclusion of ex-felons from the voting-both had altered the outcome of the
November 2000 US Presidential election. Other quantitative studies have shown
that the determinants of penal outcomes can be understood in detail only if pros-
ecution and sentencing patterns are analyzed at a quite granular level (Greenberg
and West, 2008; Pfaff, 2017). Quantitative studies have enabled patterns of covari-
ation in penal and welfare policy to be established, lending credence and specificity
to theoretical claims that had previously been conjectural (Beckett and Western,
2001; Downes and Hansen, 2006; Garland, 1985, 2017). And quantitative estimates
of the labor market impact of mass imprisonment have opened up new interpre-
tations of the economic significance of American penal policy (Western and
Beckett, 1999).

Increased specificity
Whereas early sociological contributions to the field often wrote in broad-brush
terms about punishment and penal history, describing penality’s forms and func-
tions in a general way and making historical claims in relation to whole nations or
regions (Foucault, 1977; Garland, 2001; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981; Rothman,
1971) more recent work has been more fine-grained, using local sources and spe-
cific cases to complicate and revise more general theses and national narratives.
Histories of “American” punishment, based on secondary sources and pitched at a
high level of generality (Garland, 2001; Rothman, 1971) are now supplemented—
and significantly revised—by histories of specific states (Barker, 2009; Campbell
and Schoenfeld, 2013; Campbell, 2012; Goodman, 2014; Lynch, 2009; Page, 2011).
Accounts of “British” penal policy are being rethought in the light of work on
Scottish criminal justice and research on Northern Ireland’s penal system
14 Punishment & Society 20(1)

(Kilcummins, 2005; McAra, 2008). These “second generation” studies—with their

shift of focus from national to local—revise and complicate received accounts,
describing variation, counter-currents, and anomalous events that do not fit the
larger narrative (Goodman et al., 2017; Loader and Sparks, 2005). The result is
that we have much more detailed, action-level accounts and an improved under-
standing of the causal processes involved. The more detailed exploration of actions
and events that are possible in local, ground-level studies also permits counter-
actions and struggles to become part of the narrative. The broad-brush national
histories left out much: today these gaps are being filled in and details provided.
The overall picture of penal change or penal policy hasn’t necessarily changed
drastically but that picture is becoming more nuanced and fine-grained.
Of course, complexity isn’t necessarily a virtue in sociological analysis.
Sociologists aim to discover recurring patterns and general processes, not to doc-
ument unique circumstances or one-time events. But second-generation scholars
are beginning to take stock and explore the broader consequences of their histor-
ical research, developing new syntheses and rethinking more general historical
narratives and sociological accounts in the light of them (Campbell and
Schoenfeld, 2013; Goodman et al., 2017).

From single cases to comparisons

The sociology of punishment initially grew out of critical penology and penological
scholarship tends to be local: focused on a specific penal system or criminal justice
process. This focus on a single case makes sense if the concern is to describe specific
developments, evaluate programs and outcomes, or to argue for reform. But if the
aim is sociological understanding and causal explanation, then controls and com-
parisons become important as a means to deepen analysis and allow a better grasp
of variation and generalizability. We are beginning to see these comparative
research strategies appear in the sociology of punishment, with more monographs
being built around multiple cases rather than just a single one (Barker, 2009;
Haney, 2010).
We are also seeing the emergence of a properly comparative penology, though
this field of enquiry is still at an early stage, with only a handful of serious studies
completed and a great deal of path-clearing work to be done (Cavadino and
Dignan, 2005; Lappi Seppala, 2008, 2017; Nelken, 2010). It seems certain that
this work will grow more important in future, not least because co-ordinated
efforts within the EU and the Council of Europe are bringing penal systems
under the regulatory frameworks of European prison law and human rights con-
ventions (Daems et al., 2013; Van Zyl Smit and Snacken, 2009).
A related (though less wide-ranging) project is the effort to situate
American penality in a comparative context, using data from other nations to
highlight the distinctiveness of America’s extraordinarily high levels of punishment
and to generate explanatory hypotheses grounded in these comparisons (Garland,
2013, 2017; Lacey and Soskice, 2015, 2017; Reitz, 2017; Savelsberg, 1994).
Garland 15

A mirror-image undertaking is the attempt to explain “Nordic Exceptionalism”—

namely the strikingly low rates of imprisonment and high levels of welfare provi-
sion that characterize the penal systems of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and—more
recently—Finland (Pratt and Eriksson, 2013; Ugelkiv and Dullum, 2012). In both
cases, a motivating concern is to isolate the historical conditions and social pro-
cesses that generate unusually high or unusually low levels of punishment, the
better to avoid or to embrace them in policy-making. Thus Michael Tonry
(2009) talks of “risk factors” and “protective factors” that bear on a nation’s
propensity for over-imprisonment, while Ian Loader (2010) writes of the social
and political conditions in which “penal moderation” can flourish.
The development of these comparative projects is both an effect and a cause of
the increasing maturity of the sociology of punishment as an academic field. The
challenges of comparative work are many but its aspiration is the development of
conceptual frameworks capable of explaining variation between penal systems, and
not just change over time within single jurisdictions. On that measure too, the field
is making progress though much work remains to be done.9

From the autonomy of penal processes to their relative autonomy

A recurring theme in the punishment and society literature concerns the crime-
punishment relationship, or more precisely, the extent to which penal policy
choices are independent of crime patterns and crime trends. My own view here
is that the relationship between crime rates and penal policies is an empirical issue
that will vary across time and space, but approaches to this empirical question are
inevitably shaped by theoretical—and sometimes ideological—assumptions.
A founding principle of the sociology of punishment (Garland, 1990) is that
penal phenomena are not to be understood as a simple reaction or response to
crime, but instead have their own dynamics and determinations. Punishment is a
social institution not an automatic reaction or a mechanical response.
Rather than see punishment processes as wholly autonomous, scholars in this
field have begun to think more in terms of relative autonomy. In other words, we
can respect the integrity of policy-formation in the penal system without asserting
that penal policies are unrelated to crime rates, crime perceptions, crime fears, and
theories of crime causation and crime control. Crime affects punishment insofar as
it produces a volume effect (changes in the number of case processed) or a policy
effect (changes in penal tactics or strategy that respond to perceived crime prob-
lems). When the latter effect occurs, it generally does so slowly and in a mediated
fashion. Real or perceived changes in crime rates or in the nature of crime affect
policy to the extent that they generate shifts in public or professional opinion that
subsequently gain political traction, legal enactment, and practical enforcement.
The relationship is a complex, mediated one—but a significant one nevertheless.
In some prominent analyses of penal change (Alexander, 2010; Wacquant,
2009) writers have insisted that there is no relation between crime trends and
penal policy and that penal policy is an autonomous, politically motivated
16 Punishment & Society 20(1)

undertaking, quite unrelated to efforts at crime control. On this radical view,

patterns of punishment and rates of imprisonment are wholly determined by
social and political processes and bear no relation to rates of crime. This view
is, however, coming to be viewed as untenable (Garland, 2013; Goodman et al.,
2017; Pfaff, 2016; Western, 2006, 2016). The phenomenon in question is, after all,
the punishment of criminal offences and offenders, and the latter (offences and
offenders) always operate in some relation to the former (punishment), and always
exert some pressure on its character and extent. Crime rates—including violent
crime rates—may increase steeply without immediately producing corresponding
changes in penal practice, as they did in the US between 1965 and 1973. And
imprisonment rates may increase despite the fact that crime rates are falling, as
occurred during the 1990s and 2000s. But a time lag between changes in one and
changes in the other does not mean that the two are unrelated. As Garland (2001)
and Miller (2016) have insisted, it makes little sense to analyze late 20th-century
American penal policy without bearing in mind the extraordinary levels of violent
crime and disorder that characterized parts of the US in the 1960s and 1970s, and
the social, cultural, and political consequences that flowed from this.
Penal processes develop in a complex relation to crime processes, and one does
not directly or immediately determine the other. “Crime problems” are subject to
competing definitions and are sometimes proxies for other issues; penal “solutions”
are contested both pragmatically and ideologically; and punishments may be
selected for symbolic rather than instrumental effect.10 But there is generally
some relationship, however mediated and indirect. So when we compare rates of
imprisonment across jurisdictions, or across time, any inferences we draw about
repressiveness or punitiveness ought to be modified by consideration of the pat-
terns, trends, and rates of crime to which these penal measures are, in some part,
a response.
Penal phenomena certainly require analysis in their own terms. But this does not
mean that they operate in a vacuum. The causal chain connecting crime and
violence to punishment policy is a long one with many mediating links but the
connections are undeniable and are beginning to be understood in all their com-
plexity. Similarly, penal control is a distinctive kind of control—and a specific
characteristic of punishment—that repays analysis on its own terms (Garland,
2017). But it is also one of several forms of social control, often operating in
tandem with, or as a substitute for other, non-penal modes. We are beginning to
think crime and punishment—penal control and social control—punishment and
welfare—state violence and interpersonal violence—together (Garland, 2017a;
Miller, 2016). And this, it seems to me, is a development to be welcomed.

Questions of scope and boundaries

Over the last two decades, there has been a definite expansion in the range and
scope of “punishment and society” scholarship (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2018).
The field now includes research on immigration detention and criminalization (Aas
Garland 17

and Bosworth, 2013; Melossi, 2015); punishment in schools (Hirschfield, 2008;

Kupchik, 2010); penal aspects of the war on terror (LaFree, others); misdemeanor
justice (Kohler-Hausmann, 2015); the international regulation of prisons and penal
law (Coyle and Van Zyl Smit (eds), 2000; Van zyl Smit and Snacken, 2009); human
rights enforcement (Savelsberg, 2018); lynching and private punishments (Garland,
2017); visual representations of punishment (Carrabine) and global perspectives on
the history of imprisonment (Anderson, 2016; Gibson, 2011). Meanwhile, older
questions of gender and punishment and of punishment and political economy
are being addressed with new levels of theoretical sophistication (Di
Giorgio, 2006; Haney, 2004, 2011; Lacey and Soskice, 2017; Sutton, 2004). Each
of these developments raises anew the question of the field’s proper boundaries
(Melossi, 2011): do we study criminal punishment and penal systems? Any and
every form of punishment? Penal control? Crime control? Social control? And is
the field coterminous with criminal justice studies? (In which case, policing and
prosecution are certainly to be included, as are sentencing law and practice.) My
own view about this, which is I think, quite widely shared, is that these boundary
issues are best approached as pragmatic ones and that the scope of inquiry ought
to be determined by the paths that our research questions open up rather than by
any prior stipulations.

Topic-centered research and theory-centered research

The pull of the policy audience (Sarat and Silbey, 1988) is very powerful in pun-
ishment and society scholarship. Funding and access often track the policy con-
cerns of criminal justice authorities. And even where there are no funding
incentives, there is an understandable tendency for researchers to investigate
issues that are on the policy agenda, where new data and findings might make a
difference to policy outcomes. The same applies when a topic becomes politically
salient—the death penalty, mass incarceration, felon disfranchisement, penal fees
and charges, private prisons, and prison suicides for example. But one of the
features that distinguishes “punishment and society” scholarship from traditional
“penology” or criminal justice research is a concern with deeper questions of social
explanation and theorization—with what happens (on a recurring, patterned, pre-
dictable basis) as well as what is currently happening. As a consequence, the field
ought to maintain an engagement with questions of a more fundamental nature.
We need to address basic questions about the normative foundations of punish-
ment; the communicative functions of punishment; the forms of punishment; the
nature of penal power; and about penal control’s relation to social control. We
have dozens of studies of American mass incarceration but very few analyses of the
nature of penal power in the US and elsewhere.
A more general way of putting the same point is to observe that “punishment
and society” remains a topic-centered subject. We mostly study specific penal
practices because of their intrinsic social, political, or moral interest and not
because they might have strategic value for theory-development. Compared to
18 Punishment & Society 20(1)

these topic-centered inquiries, research that is undertaken in order to test or refine

theory is still relatively rare. So too are replication studies, except in the “what
works” reform literature where these are more common.
We might also note that a great deal of writing in this field tends to be critical or
reformist in nature—a feature which is largely to be welcomed, even if it occasion-
ally leads to tendentious or biased claims that would not withstand empirical
scrutiny (for a critical discussion, see Pfaff, 2017). But a more basic problem, it
seems to me, is that there is not much ideological variation or “viewpoint
diversity” in this field—a political fact that has theoretical consequences. The
dominant current of thought in punishment and society scholarship is without
doubt, progressive or left-liberal in its political orientation. There are few conser-
vative voices in the field and it is rare to find scholars who altogether approve of
current policy and practice. Mass incarceration has few supporters and even schol-
ars who point to its crime-reduction effects or its grounding in popular preferences
stop short of describing it as legitimate. Private prisons and commercialized cor-
rections likewise have few supporters in the academy, despite their appeal to
politicians and policymakers. As a general matter, it appears that those who
study punishment typically want less of it. For most scholars in this field, less
intense sanctions are preferable to more intense; shorter sentences are preferable
to longer ones; discretionary sentences preferable to mandatory penalties; non-
custodial measures to imprisonment; and monetary penalties to correctional super-
vision. For the same reasons, punitive policies are generally viewed as less desirable
than rehabilitative, restorative, or welfarist ones.
These ideological commitments—which often explain why young academics
take up this subject in the first place—will continue to press punishment and
society scholarship toward the reformist, activist camp. And perhaps such an ori-
entation is to be welcomed in the face of punishment’s tragic character (Garland,
1990). But there are good analytical reasons to hope that at least some scholars in
the field will open up questions that contradict the conventional wisdom and press
contradictory viewpoints, even when they seem politically unpopular. It may,
for example, be productive to take up a contrarian stance and ask questions
such as: Why don’t societies use punishment more than they currently do? Are
retributive sanctions necessary to sustain social norms? Do the rituals of punish-
ment have a moral or social value beyond their effects as crime control? What
value or benefits do mass incarceration or capital punishment bring to their sup-
porters? Thinking against the grain in these and other ways would seem valuable in
any field, but it is especially important in a field that exhibits a broadly shared
ideological orientation.

An illustration: “Mass incarceration” and its emergence

I can illustrate these points with some concrete examples drawn from the literature
on the growth of American penality—a specialism that accounts for more publi-
cations in this field than any other. A close look at this research program—which
Garland 19

began in earnest with a special issue of this journal (Punishment & Society, 2000)
and which has since attracted a great deal of attention and many talented young
scholars—should enable me to show how the field has advanced theoretically and
methodologically and to identify some of the problems we still have to address.
Recent historical studies—many of them written by historical sociologists or
institutionalist political scientists—have played a notable role in advancing our
analytical understanding of the causal dynamics of penal change (Barker, 2009;
Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2017; Forman, 2017;
Fortner, 2015; Lynch, 2009; Perkinson, 2010, etc.) These studies have worked at
the local rather than the national level, focusing on carefully selected states, uti-
lizing archival sources, and developing contrasts and comparisons that have
prompted significant revisions to the broad historical narratives that previously
shaped our understanding. More importantly, these studies have often been
theory-driven—undertaken in ways that tested existing explanations as well as
extending their empirical reach—and analytical—i.e. designed to identify causal
processes together with the recurring or contingent patterns of opportunity, incen-
tive, value, and action that produced them. Reflections on the cumulative findings
of these historical studies (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Goodman et al., 2017)
have gone beyond the emphasis on complexity and contingency (the historian’s
usual rebuke to the sociologist) to identify patterns of agency, interest-group for-
mation, and opportunity structures and to theorize about recurring social process-
es and causal mechanisms. The result is that we now possess a more analytical
and theoretically articulated account of penal change, and not just a more com-
plicated or variegated one. Here are some of the lessons we can draw from this
body of work.
First of all: the importance of establishing the phenomenon, which is to say,
providing a detailed, factual account of what exactly it is that needs to be
explained.11 This preliminary, descriptive work serves not just to dispense with
pseudo-factual misconceptions—a crucial task for any research—but also to move
inquiry in an empirically grounded direction and provide a basis upon which to
choose between competing explanatory hypotheses.12
From the late 1990s onward, scholars have been concerned to explain the
remarkable growth in US rates of imprisonment. Over time, we have come to
see that that “the rise of mass incarceration” (as this development is often
described) is in fact a cumulative outcome of multiple processes operating at dif-
ferent scales, in different jurisdictions, in different historical periods, prompted by
different events and motivations. That most of these processes moved in the same
direction, expanding and intensifying the deployment of penal power, and
that these expansionist processes continued for almost four decades, can make it
appear that “mass incarceration” has been generated by one, continuous, over-
arching causal process, such as neoliberalization or the New Jim Crow. But a more
fine-grained analysis, focused on historical and geographical variation, and on
system-level processes, makes it clear that such assumptions are unwarranted,
for the following reasons:
20 Punishment & Society 20(1)

There is no single “American penal system’

The “national” rate of imprisonment bundles together federal and state prison and
jail populations. State and even county level details are vital to understanding how
the US system operates (Garland, 2017; Pfaff, 2017). Few generalizations are ever
secure, and the common practice of making general statements based on federal
patterns is liable to be misleading since federal law and enforcement are often quite
different from their state-level equivalents (Pfaff, 2017). The institutional terrain
upon which “mass incarceration” was built turns out to be quite varied, as are local
penal politics. And although all 50 states and the federal government
have increased incarceration, there have been marked difference in the kinds of
transformations that have occurred, both quantitatively and qualitatively; and the
multiple processes driving prison growth need to be specified and disaggregated.
The prison population of some states (such as California) have increased massive-
ly; others (such as Maine) much more modestly. Some have seen a profound
alteration in their operating aims; others have continued to operate largely as
before and have seen their established policies spread to other states and regions
(Lynch, 2009).
State-based historical studies have prompted us to revise a standard narrative,
which asserted that penal policy in the US had shifted from a rehabilitative
approach to a more punitive one (Garland, 2001). We now know that the standard
account embodied two unwarranted generalizations: a regional one, which took
the correctionalism of the Northeastern states and California to be a nation-wide
feature, when in fact states in the South and Southwest never adopted correction-
alism to anything like the same extent (Campbell, 2011; Lynch, 2009; Schoenfeld,
2014). And we also now know that the “correctionalist” commitment in American
criminal justice was more fully expressed in the adoption of indeterminate sentenc-
ing than in the effective, widespread delivery of correctional and welfare services
subsequent to that sentencing (Pifferi, 2016).

Proximate causes and background causes

The first wave of “punishment and society” research tended to differentiate itself
from traditional penal scholarship by concentrating on structural causation: that is
on the cultural, political, and economic processes that shaped the contours of
punishment and penal change. But more recent work has rediscovered the impor-
tance of the proximate causes of changing patterns of punishment—causes that lie
not in background social causes but in foreground state and legal processes
(Garland, 2013). The result is a renewed attention to legislative changes made to
sentencing law and to the actions of legal decision-makers such as prosecutors,
sentencing judges, corrections departments, and parole boards pursuant to these
legal changes (Pfaff, 2017; Stuntz, 2011).
In explaining America’s expanded prison populations and increased rates of
imprisonment, the most immediate causes are specific forms of state and federal
Garland 21

action: the legislative enactment of mandatory sentences; increased penalties

or sentence enhancements; changes in eligibility for parole or good time release;
sentencing guidelines; the re-imprisonment of parole violators; more aggressive
prosecutorial charging; tougher plea agreements; and so on. These system-
specific processes determine penal outcomes—numbers admitted to custody; num-
bers released; average time served, etc.—in ways that are obvious but which were
sometimes overlooked in the concern to identify the “prime movers” behind mass
incarceration. At the level of system processes, it was the ongoing, three-decades
long, post-1970s revolution in sentencing law that led to more offenders being sent
to jail and prison, for longer sentences, with less prospect of early release, and to a
greater likelihood of re-imprisonment for parole violation (Tonry, 2016).
The precise nature of these legal enactments is important because small varia-
tions in enacted laws or their enforcement can generate large variations in penal
outcomes. “Three strikes” laws have been passed in dozens of states as well as in
the federal criminal code, but the California legislation, with its distinctive speci-
fication of offenses that trigger a sentence enhancement—together with the prac-
tice of local prosecutors in charging under this law—resulted in thousands of
enhanced sentences and large increases in the California prison population
(Zimring et al., 2001). Similar laws in other states, with slightly different provisions
and different patterns of enforcement, generated many fewer such sentences and
much smaller prison population increases. Explaining why California’s prison pop-
ulation is larger than that of other states is thus, in the first instance, a matter of
accounting for these legislative and enforcement differences, rather than of iden-
tifying the social factors that generally exert pressure for mandatory penalties and
severe sentencing.
Given the importance of these intra-system processes, it comes as no surprise
that some of the most insightful work on the causes of mass incarceration has come
from legal academics focusing on the impact of legal rules. The renewed focus on
procedural rights and their unintended consequences (Stuntz, 2011); on sentencing
law and its technicalities (Tonry, 2016); sentencing guidelines and their varied
operational effects (Reitz, 2013; Frase, 2005); on changes in prosecutorial practice
(Lynch, 2016; Pfaff, 2017); on judicial decisions (Simon, 2014; Garland, 2010); and
on collateral legal consequences (Alexander, 2010, Harris, 2016)—has given a
more reality-congruent texture to our understanding of American incarceration.
It depicts “mass incarceration” not as a unified strategy but as an historically
emergent outcome that was produced and reproduced by the micro-level, multi-
actor routines of criminal justice as well as by the larger social, economic, and
cultural currents that shaped the post-1970s politics of law and order.

There was no single process of expansion

The dynamics that drove prison growth—changes in sentencing law, changes in
prosecutorial practice, changes in practices of release, changes in re-imprisonment
for parole violation—were established in different places, at different points in
22 Punishment & Society 20(1)

time, and with no great uniformity. In some instances, the federal government took
the lead, providing model legislation and incentives for states to follow—as with
the “war on drugs” or “truth in sentencing.” At other times, the US Congress
passed laws that emulated legislation already enacted in the states—such as the
federal sentencing guidelines or the later Three-Strikes laws. There were, however,
phases of development: periods of time in which particular reform initiatives dom-
inated legislative agendas across the nation—notably the shift toward determinate
sentencing in the mid-1970s; the War on Drugs of the mid-1980s, and the tough on
crime legislation of the 1990s (see Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Zimring, 2001;
Tonry, 2016).
The best work describes these three periods, each of which was characterized by
certain policies and practices that were subsequently disrupted by new waves of
reform undertaken by identifiable actors with specific motives and structured
opportunities for action. Each era provided a platform for the development of
the next, and for almost four decades, prison numbers continued to rise, even as
different kinds of offences and offenders shaped the expanding population. In each
successive phase, a sequence of developments occurred. New actors emerged, as
interest groups formed to represent crime victims, prison guards, local prosecutors,
and commercial corrections companies. New policy goals came to the fore: just
deserts and determinate sentencing; incapacitation; expressive punishment; or
punitiveness. New reform agendas developed: the sentencing guideline movement,
the war on drugs; the anti-recidivism of “three-strikes” or “truth in sentencing’; or
the cost-saving punitiveness of southern-style “cheap and mean” prison regimes.
New incentives and funding mechanisms were established—federal subventions to
fund the war on drugs; forfeiture laws; funding to enable prison building if states
agreed to restrict early release; and state financing devices enabling private prison
building without the need for a public bond approval or new taxes. New political
imperatives were established—a stance of “tough on crime” became a prerequisite
for anyone running for public offence; policies that favored the South and
Southwest became popular as these regions grew in electoral and political signif-
icance. New feed-back loops emerged—as developments at the federal level filtered
down to the states, and trends in state governance were taken up at the national
level (Campbell and Schoenfeld, 2013; Gottschalk, 2014). There is also some evi-
dence to suggest that America may currently be entering a new phase of penal
development, with slowed rates of overall growth; new processes of decarceration;
a growing public awareness of costs and injustices associated with “mass incarcer-
ation’; and the formation of coalitions that aim to reduce prison populations and
correctional spending (Gottschalk, 2014; Aviram, 2015).

Grand narratives and macro-sociological explanations

Large-scale, forcefully argued claims that mass incarceration has been generated
by neoliberalism, by a New Jim Crow, or by a “culture of control” have functioned
as illuminating heuristics and generative provocations. But as analytical accounts,
Garland 23

they have definite limitations. They don’t capture the multi-layered texture of
actor’s meanings, the complexity of historical events, the role of contingency,
the operation of counter-forces, or the variations of local outcome. In the
nature of things, high-level narratives conceal as much as they reveal and only
fulfill their explanatory potential when they are supplemented by waves of subse-
quent research that correct their mistakes and fill in their omissions. Large-scale
structural forces—institutionalized racism, federalist political arrangements, a lib-
eral market economy, cultural conservativism—are always modified and inflected
as one moves closer to the penal action. These overarching structures are modified,
obstructed, deflected, enabled, or amplified in their effects by each impacting on
the other; by the intermediate institutions and organized fields through which they
operate; and by the countless on-the-ground actors who align themselves with, or
offer resistance to, the opportunities and obstacles that these structures place in
their way.
When we think of the social causes of penal outcomes we should always bear in
mind that social causes only affect penal outcomes to the extent that they operate on
and through legal or criminal justice processes—as we saw just now when discussing
proximate causes. Racism, neoliberalism, populist punitiveness, and so on only ever
impact penal outcomes to the extent that they enlist, realign or somehow change the
conduct of actors and decision-makers in the penal process. And that penal process
is itself complicated—involving multiple actors and decision-points—and capable of
generating effects that are unintended and counter-intuitive. Only detailed work can
illuminate how and why things turn out as they do.

Complicating conventional wisdom

I noted earlier that a vital task of sociological research is to challenge conventional
wisdom and replace it where necessary with analyses that are empirically grounded
and theoretically coherent. One area where corrective efforts of this kind have
recently borne fruit concerns the “war on drugs,” its racial character and its role
in the creation of mass incarceration. In recent years, it has become a fundamental
shibboleth of critical commentary and progressive opinion that the “war on drugs”
was a racially motivated political project that had little to do with crime control
and has been the chief cause of America’s massive prison build up and the over-
incarceration of young men of color. That conventional wisdom has recently been
challenged in important respects, not by conservatives who support draconian
anti-drug legislation but by sociologists and historians of punishment who gener-
ally agree that drug law enforcement has been repressive and racialized but whose
research adds significant nuance to this story. Here again, the use of more detailed,
disaggregated data has been crucial in advancing knowledge; as has careful atten-
tion to law and legal process.
First of all, data about prison inmates and the offenses of which they have been
imprisoned indicate that drug crime accounts for a large proportion of federal
prison inmates but a much smaller proportion in state prisons. This suggests
24 Punishment & Society 20(1)

that the war on drugs is unlikely to have been the lead cause of prison growth. It
also suggests that the release of non-violent, low-level drug offenders—a standard
proposal of many reformers—is unlikely to make a big impact on prison popula-
tions, however appropriate that reform would be (Gottschalk, 2014a).
Secondly, researchers have gone behind the slogan—a “war on drugs”—to
examine the political and legal phenomena to which it refers. Here again, details
matter. Commentators sometimes point to President Richard Nixon as the origi-
nator of the war, citing remarks he made in 1971 to that effect and connecting it to
the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party with its racialized intent. But in fact
Nixon’s approach to drug offending was much less punitive than this suggests
(Hinton, 2016) and it was not until the mid-1980s that a Republican Congress
under Ronald Reagan passed its landmark Anti-Drug Abuse laws. Similarly, many
scholars point to the passage of New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws in 1973
as the beginning of that “war” and the start of a nation-wide pattern. But in the
years immediately following that enactment, the imprisonment of drug offenders in
New York actually declined (Pfaff, 2017).
Thirdly, there is the question of the political motivations that drove the crimi-
nalization of drug possession and sale. Here again, more detailed historical research
suggests that these policies cannot be reduced to a simple story of right-wing racial
politics. A crucial observation here is that the “War on Drugs” was in fact sup-
ported, initially at least, by African American community leaders and political
representatives (Forman, 2017; Fortner, 2015; Kohler-Hausmann, 2017). For
these communities, illegal drug use and drug markets were not crimes without
victims: they were a dangerous blight that brought robbery, burglary, violence,
and addiction to their neighborhoods. And while the communities typically called
for public health and pro-social policies, tougher policing and punishment were
usually the only responses on offer (Forman, 2017).
If the war on drugs was undertaken on a pretextual basis, there is reason to
think that an important motive was not to oppress Blacks but instead to control
violence—including violence affecting African American communities and African
American victims. According to writers such as Stuntz (2011), the main aim of
anti-drug legislation was to routinize the apprehension of violent offenders who
could then be convicted using lower standards of proof but nevertheless faced with
high penalties. As a crime-control tactic, the new focus on drug offences had a
series of tactical advantages. To prosecute crimes of violence, the authorities must
generally rely on witnesses coming forward and mens rea being proved. In contrast,
drug possession and possession with intent to distribute were virtually strict liabil-
ity offences that could be proactively addressed by police stops or by “buy and
bust” methods. For the proponents of the new drug laws, the war on drugs was to
be a more effective legal means of targeting violent offenders, gang leaders, orga-
nized criminals, and “drug czars.” Just as Al Capone had been convicted of tax
evasion, violent offenders could be brought to justice on account of their involve-
ment in drugs. For many of its supporters, the war on drugs was a proxy war,
Garland 25

directed not at recreational drug users but at the violent criminals working in this
illegal market (Stuntz, 2011).
An additional motivation for the war on drugs—perhaps the most significant
one in the long-term—derived from the fact that a focus on drug control provided
the federal government with a plausible basis on which to become more involved in
crime control, which by the 1980s was a social problem of great concern to large
sectors of the American public. Historically, criminal justice had been a matter for
local government and the US constitution limited the extent to which the federal
authorities could involve themselves in the business of crime-control. However,
such was the political salience of crime in the 1960s that federal politicians looked
for ways to involve themselves more actively, and thereby reap some of the polit-
ical rewards of responding to public concerns (Gottschalk, 2006; Hinton, 2016).
This involvement initially took the form of establishing federal agencies—such as
the LEAA—to co-ordinate or fund local law enforcement. But the criminalization
of drug use opened up a more direct federal involvement because drugs could be
deemed to be a form of interstate commerce—a domain over which the federal
government always had jurisdiction. Waging a war on drugs was, for the US
Congress and the Presidency, a means of circumventing constitutional constraints
on a federal politics of law and order.
From the 1980s on, Congress passed anti-drug abuse laws and federal prose-
cutors, federal courts and federal penitentiaries enforced them with great vigor.
But ultimately the war on drugs would be fought at the local level, by local police
and prosecutors, so the federal authorities contrived to incentivize local action by
providing generous subsidies for local drug-war enforcement and, notably, by
passing forfeiture legislation that allowed local law enforcement to seize and
retain cash or property deemed to be the proceeds of drug crime. Over time,
these lucrative incentives prompted a massive over-reach of enforcement: a drug
war supposedly aimed at serious violent offenders eventually swept up a mass of
petty offenders and low-level street dealers – most of them African American – and
sentenced them to prison terms that bore little relation to their culpability or public
threat (Hinton, 2016; Lynch, 2016; Tonry, 2016).
Today, the crime-control impacts of the war on drugs remain uncertain, even as
its racial impacts become more undeniable. We lack good data bearing upon that
question other than the street prices of banned drugs and the number of arrests—
the latter being a measure of police effort rather than underlying crime rates. So
though we can say that the rise in imprisonment rates has coincided in time with
the decline in property crime and violence, we can make no such claim about the
impact of the war on drugs in rates of illegal drug possession, sale, and
manufacturing.13

Conclusion
I have focused on the advances of the last 20 years but of course problems remain
and challenges await us. If the literature on the historical sociology of mass
26 Punishment & Society 20(1)

incarceration illustrates some of the advances that have been made, there are many
other areas where theory and research are much less well developed. A case in
point concerns the comparative question of why, on most dimensions, American
punishment appears harsher than that of comparable nations. This question
broadens the object of analysis beyond rates of imprisonment since America is
also an outlier in its use of extreme penalties, sentence lengths, collateral conse-
quences, correctional supervision, and in its limited use of monetary sanctions as a
penalty for ordinary crime (Garland, 2017). And being a comparative question this
research inquiry is rather more difficult to address than the question of change over
time that I have been discussing. For one thing, the underlying problems are dif-
ferent: history is about the tracing of actions and events and consequences—at the
level of the individual, the group, and the institution or structure. But tracing
differences of extent, intensity and scale across nations is a matter of identifying
factors that press toward high rates as opposed to low; of identifying risk factors or
preventatives; and of observing incentives and facilitators as well as limits or
brakes. And these various factors and processes are interactive. It is quite likely
that the explanation of American distinctiveness will not be a matter of causal
processes that are unique or distinctive but instead of forces and factors that more
powerfully motivate these processes or which weaken the counter-forces that limit
the growth of punishment elsewhere. Another basic difficulty is that we currently
lack good comparable data—indeed we haven’t even settled on a set of metrics.
And finally, although we have a series of plausible explanatory frameworks, each
of which is supported by empirical evidence of various kinds, these are all pitched
at a macro-sociological level and have yet to specify—let alone empirically prove—
the mechanisms, processes, and intermediating linkages through which the macro
structures come to shape penal patterns and outcomes (Garland, 2017).
Examples of such under-developed fields could be multiplied, but the point is
clear. For all the important advances made in the sociology of punishment over the
last 20 years, there is no shortage of challenging work awaiting us in the years
ahead.

Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Mona Lynch for helpful comments and suggestions and also to the Filomen
D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund at NYU School of Law.

Notes
1. See Simon and Sparks (2012) “Introduction” for an account of the formation of
the field.
2. These reflections are not based on a systematic empirical “sociology of knowledge”
study (such as Abend (2006) has presented for sociology; Savelsberg (2004) for
criminology) but are personal impressions I have formed working continuously in
this field over a lengthy period of time. I will focus here on the sociology of pun-
ishment but readers should bear in mind that there are today many disciplines that
Garland 27

are brought to bear on “punishment and society”: political science; law; history;
economics; African-American studies; cultural theory; ethnography; political econ-
omy; and comparative social policy to mention the most prominent.
3. For an influential manifesto, see Thompson (2010). Of course historical studies of
other periods also continue to appear: McLennan (2008), Guy Geltner (2015).
4. See the special issues of two American historical journals—on the rise of the car-
ceral state: “Historians of the Carceral State” Journal of American History 102/1
(2015) and “Urban America and the Carceral State” Journal of Urban History 41/5
(2015). On the history of the present, see Garland (2014).
5. Scull’s work on decarceration (Scull, 1977) was a notable example of how analysts
can sometimes get it wrong.
6. See Whitman (2003) on the limits of what he terms the sociology of modernity
when dealing with specific cases, national histories, and local cultures of
punishment.
7. For a classic statement of the limits of general theory and the place of middle-range
theorizing in scientific development, see Merton (1996b).
8. On analytical sociology, see Bearman and Hestrom (2009).
9. Compare the comparative study of welfare states—comparative social policy—
which emerged decades before the sociology of punishment and which has achieved
an impressive level of maturity, as measured in these terms.
10. The processes to which I am pointing here are, of course, the subject matter of the
literature on the sociology of social problems (for an overview, see Best, 2015).
Theoretical understandings of how social problems are constructed, derived from
that literature, can therefore be mobilized as an element of the sociology of crime
and punishment.
11. On establishing the phenomenon, see Merton (1987) and Garland (2010).
As Merton observes: “Strongly held theoretical expectations or ideologically
induced expectations can lead to perceptions of historical and social ‘facts’ even
when these are readily refutable by strong evidence close at hand” (1987: 4).
12. Recurring misconceptions in this field include over-estimations of the impact of the
war on drugs on the prison population (which assume that the federal
prison population is typical of the state prisons when in fact it is quite different);
of the role of private prisons and the prison-industrial complex (only about 8% of
prison beds are commercial; commercial corrections took off long after the prison
build-up was underway); about the role of DNA excupatory evidence in the 150
plus death row exonerations (fewer than 20 have been based on DNA evidence),
and so on.
13. We need to remember that drug crime is not one of the index crimes reported by
the FBI and does not feature in the usual crime trends data. Pfaff (2017) gives
broad national estimates; Beckett et al. (2005) carefully estimate patterns for
Seattle.

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David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of

Sociology at New York University. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of
Punishment & Society and the author of several books in the sociology of punish-
ment and control. His most recent book, The Welfare State: A Very Short
Introduction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.