America's extraordinary penal state: A structural explanation

Americans, above all poor Black Americans, are subject to extraordinary levels of police violence, incarceration, and penal control—levels that exist nowhere else in the developed world. This article outlines a comparative, structural explanation of America's extraordinary penal state, pointing to the structural arrangements and historical processes that created it and keep it in place; describing how these political and economic structures differ from those of other nations; and indicating how the macro-structures of political economy interact with community-level processes of social ordering and informal social control to shape street-level practices of crime, policing, and punishment. The article goes beyond the existing “political economy and punishment” literature by broadening the explicandum to include America's extraordinary levels of criminal and police violence; by describing the interaction of social and penal controls; by detailing the negative social indicators associated with America's peculiar political economy; and by highlighting causal factors such as social control deficits, state capacity limitations, and the effect of neighborhood disorganization and danger on the actions of criminal justice officials.