James Campbell's Crime and Punishment in African American History is a very welcome addition to Palgrave Macmillan's American History in Depth series. In common with other contributions to this series, from Collin Bonwick's The American Revolution (2005) to Michael Heale's McCarthy's Americans (1997), Campbell's study addresses a major and long-standing concern of US history. In fact, upon first inspection, Crime and Punishment in African American History's stated aim, of building upon “grassroots studies” in order to “join … many individual stories” (4) into a composite account about the ordeals of racist US law, can look a little familiar. Historians already well acquainted with such grassroots studies might expect to glean little new information from Campbell's archive; others might consider his long chronology – his very “wide-lens” range – a touch ambitious (4). Even those who are not involved in this field are likely to find elements of Crime and Punishment in African American History reminiscent of Loic Wacquant's well-known sociological writings or even of Leon F. Litwack's celebrated histories Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1980) and Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Any such reservations, however, soon prove unfounded. Crime and Punishment in African American History, far from retreading familiar ground or spreading itself too thin, instead quickly proves itself an object lesson in broad historical narrative. Campbell's repeated movement from case study to the statistical and the national enables Crime and Punishment in African American History to amass a powerful body of evidence that, as well as being authoritative per se, also allows it to establish beyond doubt that the postindustrial phenomenon that Wacquant has called “hyperincarceration” is only the latest dismal instalment in a long historical arc in which the law, far from always standing at the vanguard of new freedoms, has in fact proven indispensable as a tool for perpetuating subjugation, even slavery, under new guises. Our historical era can seem as prone as any other to valorize US law, and to salute it as a sort of democratic bulwark against the perennial injustices of daily life. The actual facts of US history, if always providing a good defence against such sentimentality, grow all the more powerful when they reach us in the distilled and synthesized form of Campbell's expansive interpretation. Students and scholars who are working on other aspects of US cultural and political tradition perhaps stand to gain most of all from this fine study. Thanks to its broad narrative sweep, however, Crime and Punishment in African American History uncovers overarching national and chronological patterns that deserve the attention of even the most specialized and experienced US historian.