Seymour Martin Lipset argued that “a person who knows only one country knows no countries.” I tend to agree. In research on prison social order, however, the vast majority of studies focus on a single prison. My book instead compares a medium number of cases from multiple countries, using these rich ethnographic studies as data in a broader comparative analysis. Wenzelburger correctly notes that there is often a trade-off between increasing the number of cases studied and reducing the depth of evidence in each case. Given the state of the literature, I believe we gain more by increasing explanatory power across cases than within them.

Wenzelburger’s review also raises several broader connections. First, he notes that my theory might “travel well to other settings.” In fact, this theory was developed in a wildly different context. It is a modified version of economist Douglass North’s theory, offered in the 1980s, to explain European state formation. I likewise draw on the ideas of Ronald Coase from the 1930s, who argued that transaction costs explain why people create centralized firms instead of just relying on market transactions. Finally, Harold Demsetz’s 1967 work explains when people will invest more in defining and enforcing property rights. These authors are part of a broader school, often known as New Institutional Economics, that studies transaction costs. In the prison context, transaction costs rise when there are more people, fewer pre-prison connections, and less social distance, leading to the creation of more centralized, extralegal prison institutions. The Puzzle of Prison Order is actually an out-of-sample test (way out of sample) of this framework.

Second, Wenzelburger wonders whether the case of the Civil War-era Andersonville POW camp is too different to compare to the others. Although it is substantively different because of its historical setting and operation amidst a civil war, when viewed through the institutional lens, it is very similar to other cases. In particular, it shares many of the same features of the Bolivian prison to which I compare it: no guard presence within, meager rations, complete freedom of movement inside, and no exit options. On these grounds, the cases are highly similar in important institutional ways. The one major difference—access to the outside world—helps explain why social order at Andersonville falls into what Wenzelburger describes as “totally inhumane conditions” while relative order emerges in the Bolivian prison. The case of Andersonville is also of interest because it is actually the topic of ongoing debate among public choice economists. In 1972, Thomas Hogarty argued that the Andersonville case was proof that order cannot emerge without a strong, effective state. One response, from Virgil Storr in 2006, argued that officials at Andersonville actively prevented self-organization among the prisoners. I offer a new explanation in the book, which I hope will be the definitive answer in this debate.

Finally, the framework in Wenzelburger’s outstanding book, The Partisan Politics of Law and Order, suggests a very plausible explanation for why some countries allow their prisons to be poorly governed, while other countries invest in resources, administration, and high-quality official governance. I did not explain this in my book, because I felt it was too far outside the scope of my argument. Fortunately for me, Wenzelburger has now filled this important gap in the literature. I only wish that I had his book in hand when I was writing mine.