Review of Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment by David Garland (Princeton University Press, 2025)

In the summer of 2020, between 6 and 10 percent of the American population joined protests against police brutality.¹ By way of comparison, only 3 percent protested the Iraq War in February 2003, and though data are hard to come by, 4 percent is a reasonable guess for the portion who demonstrated in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam war in the mid-1960s.² The 2020 protests were thus the largest mass mobilizations in the United States in living memory.

Five years later, the movement has ebbed, but the problem remains. In 2020, the year George Floyd was killed, 1,161 civilians in the United States were killed by police officers, a rate of 3.50 per million. Today, in 2025, the rate is 3.53.³ Moreover, as David Garland argues in Law and Order Leviathan, a superb, slim book on American mass incarceration, “Within a year [of the movement] . . . law and order politics had made a forceful return.”⁴ The penal state remains intact (despite long-run declines in the incarceration rate, more people are in prison today than in 2022),⁵ and Donald Trump is at its head. If the movement lives on today, it is on the activist and academic margins.