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Understanding Leviathan Today: Time to Bring in Immigration
Katja Franko*
Reading David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan was a welcome reconnection with my criminological roots. I studied criminology in the 1990s in the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo, where questions of social inequality, the destructive nature of capitalism, abolitionism, and critique of mass imprisonment were central features of scholarly debates and the curriculum. The central argument of Garland’s book, that America’s racialized political economy ‘weakens the informal social controls of civil society; contributes to extraordinary levels of criminal violence; and predisposes government to deploy policing and punishment as its standard response’ (p. 15), chimes with Nils Christie’s Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style?, originally published in 1993. Garland’s book is nevertheless much clearer about the centrality of the political economy and social inequality to the way we punish.
Although the main argument of the book may not come as a surprise to sociologically minded observers of punishment—in fact, it could be described as the backbone and a natural reflex of critical criminology—it is also surprisingly rare to see it presented with such clarity and lucidity. Its connection to the classics such as Durkheim and Marx (sparsely cited, but clearly present) distinguishes Law and Order Leviathan from much of contemporary criminology, with its focus on the novel and driven by efforts to constantly reinvent the discipline. At a time when criminology is becoming increasingly fragmented into sub-fields, a broad account that integrates a wide spectrum of literatures is refreshing and precisely what the discipline may need at this point.
Despite its grounding in classical criminological arguments, the book is also clearly situated in the debates that ensued in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests. In fact, there is a duality and a dissonance in the book since its approach is retrospective, focusing on newer U.S. history since the 1970s, yet the main narrative feels like an intervention into current debates about penal reform in the U.S. The argument is that without structural and economic reform, the extraordinary levels of policing and punishment will continue, and the U.S. will remain an international outlier (p. 126).
While this is undoubtedly an important message, a question can nevertheless be asked about the book’s usefulness for understanding the present and for informing current penal reform. Due to its retrospective approach, Law and Order Leviathan has remarkably little to say about the current political situation and law and order rhetoric. President Trump, aside from a few mentions of his first term, is entirely absent from the book. Although this may come as a relief to most readers, it is also a symptom of a deeper and more glaring omission. Can we understand the U.S. Leviathan without considering immigration enforcement? As a scholar of immigration control, I may be biased on this point. Yet I believe that today it is difficult to address the nature of punitiveness—not only in the U.S. but also globally—without understanding the urgency of immigration as a political issue. Questions of immigration and citizenship shape the social solidarity, the nature of inequality and the political economy in most Northern societies.
It is therefore surprising that in a book about America’s regime of policing and punishment, punitiveness towards immigrants is completely left out. If anything captures the image of a contemporary Leviathan, it is the massive expansion of the detention system and ICE, the largest and most well-funded U.S. federal law enforcement agency whose budget now exceeds most of the world’s militaries’.[1] About 30% of inmates in the Federal Bureau of Prisons are Hispanic, yet ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ do not even feature in the book’s index. In the chapter describing America’s Penal State, Garland simply states in a footnote that ‘U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the United States system of immigration control would require a different explanation and are not included in the present analysis’ (pg. 145). My question is, therefore, if immigration were included in the book’s explanatory framework, how would this change its structural explanations? We now have a wealth of scholarship on immigration control and its intersections with race (see inter alia Bosworth et al., 2018; Chacón, 2024) and the political economy (De Giorgi, 2017). Locating immigration outside the book’s scope of interest detracts from its explanatory power and misses an opportunity to develop a more contemporary and multi-dimensional framework.
It may be that the book should be read as a retrospective account of a previous punitive wave structured around punitive drug policies with a disproportionate impact on Black communities, a wave that is now partly relieved or redirected towards non-citizens and immigrant communities. This reading, however, raises a question about the broader applicability of the book’s explanatory framework. Is its purpose to describe a distinct historic moment that unfolded in the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s, or is its framework potentially generalizable to the present political dynamic and to other countries? This relates to a broader question that has been central to newer criminological debates, namely, how well suited is a book, whose main argument is that U.S. penal state is exceptional and different from other comparable countries, for developing general theoretical approaches?
While the book specifies that it does not offer a tight theoretical framework, it nonetheless talks about its arguments as a theory. Garland (p. 15) sees the framework as ‘in principle, generalizable, provided it is adapted and re-specified to fit the historical and institutional context to which it is applied’. It should then offer valuable insights, for example, into developments currently taking place in Sweden, where rising levels of lethal gun violence, ramping up of law-and-order responses, a growing prison population, and intense policing of minority populations undoubtedly offer several points of similarity. Yet, all this is happening in the context of a state that is decidedly a welfare state. Several Scandinavian studies (Barker, 2018; Franko, 2020) have shown that welfare states can develop a hard punitive edge towards those deemed outsiders, while being ‘soft on the inside’. Law and Order Leviathan, by contrast, sees a strong welfare state as an antidote to the penal state and does not offer any insights into the paradoxes and duality of the welfare state. I am thus left with a question about what to do with its compelling message. The book gives an impression of being outward looking and comparative in its approach, yet its message is decidedly inward looking and U.S.-focused. This relates to recent arguments by southern criminology about the problematic influence of Western penal concepts on the discipline. There is an enormous amount of research produced by and about the U.S., partly because of the dramatic nature of its use of penal power and its extreme tendencies. Consequently, a country that is an international outlier has had an overwhelming influence on the discipline and has coloured the total corpus of criminological knowledge by its experience.
Garland’s book does not make grand pronouncements about its generalizability. The reader is therefore left with the task to tease out the relevance of the ‘sensitising concepts’ presented in the book. There is no doubt that these concepts carry a lot of promise. I was particularly touched by the discussion on solidarity between the punished and the punisher and questions of empathy. There is an enormous amount of wisdom in these passages that certainly felt transferrable beyond the U.S. context. Nevertheless, the book does not attempt to build a bridge between the case specific and the general. Readers need to do this work themselves if they wish Law and Order Leviathan to be more than a cautionary tale about the dangers of rampant economic and racial inequality in the U.S. The book’s theoretical framework, which is grounded in the political economy and structural explanations of punishment, thus feels strangely atheoretical. Rusche and Kirchheimer are not even in the references, while Marx is only briefly mentioned. And although the absence of Foucault (a bit like the absence of Trump) may feel refreshing, the lack of engagement with these authors comes as a surprise, especially considering Garland’s seminal Punishment and Modern Society.
At a time when states across the globe are flexing their authoritarian muscles, the image of the Leviathan seems more appropriate than ever. Not only because Hobbes’s powerful image of the state-as-a-person—a giant wielding the sword—resonates with increasingly personified notions of political authority and leadership. More importantly, Leviathan shows the centrality of security for the nature of political order. The book shows a broader relevance of criminology and studies of punishment and society for understanding collective identity based on fear of social disorder, something that the field should capitalize on and develop further. Law and Order Leviathan therefore carries great potential to inspire further scholarly conversation within the discipline and beyond. I sincerely hope that it will do so.
However, understanding Leviathan today is more complex than ever. By pointing to the centrality of political economy, inequality, and insecurity, Garland’s book gives us a great scaffold to build on. The shadow of social discord and the longing for strong authority seem to be growing in many countries. And with the growing investment in military power, the sword wielded by the giant is getting larger. At the same time, seen from an international perspective, the standing of the U.S. as a global Leviathan and the force behind the international legal order is in decline. Although never equally established as national sovereignty, the demise of the international legal order has already made life in numerous contexts across the world more ‘nasty, brutish and short’ and the prospect of justice more distant than ever.
References
Barker, V. (2018). Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State. Routledge.
Bosworth M, Parmar A, Vázquez Y. (eds.) (2018) Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging. Oxford Univ. Press.
Chacón JM (2024) “Crimmigration”: Race, and Critical Race Theory in the United States. In Handbook on Border Criminology, ed. M Bosworth, K Franko, M Lee, R Mehta, pp. 41–56. Edward Elgar Publ.
Christie, N. (1993) Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style? Routledge.
De Giorgi, A. (2017) Re-Thinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics. Routledge.
Franko, K. (2019). The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power. Routledge.
Garland, D. (1991). Punishment and Modern Society. Oxford: OUP.
* University of Oslo.
[1] Ariana Baio, ICE Is Now Richer than Most of World’s Militaries Thanks to Trump’s New Funding, The Independent, July 16, 2025 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-funding-world-militaries-b2790466.html).
Suggested Citation: Katja Franko, “Understanding Leviathan Today: Time to Bring in Immigration,” MCLR+ (crimlrev.net) (Aug. 24, 2026) (https://crimlrev.net/2026/08/24/understanding-leviathan-today-time-to-bring-in-immigration-katja-franko/)