The emergence and consolidation of the U.S. carceral state was a major milestone in American political development that arguably rivals in significance the expansion and contraction of the welfare state in the postwar period. What we have witnessed is a “durable shift in governing authority,” to use Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek's elegant definition of what constitutes political development. The state began to exercise vast new controls over millions of people, resulting in a remarkable change in the distribution of authority in favor of law enforcement and corrections at the local, state, and particularly the federal level.

This book takes the carceral state as a central object of historical study whose construction was an important chapter in American state-building and not just the manifestation of a successful political whim by strategic conservative politicians. This political development had multiple and “dispersed causes” that pre-date the 1960s. The central focus has been on the political development of penal policy. But my account touches on some other important and recurrent themes and debates in American political development. First, it challenges the common understanding of the U.S. state as weak.