It is a little known fact that Cesare Beccaria should be included among the inspirations of the Founders of the United States. His work guided the revolutionaries as they argued why exactly the rule of the British Crown was fundamentally unjust and they were within their rights to overturn it. When Thomas Paine urged colonists to sever ties to the sanguinary empire, he referred to the fact that the English had only one sentence in their punitive toolbox: death for all! This obvious travesty of justice led the British to transport convicts to labor abroad in exchange for their heads, but the recipients of these convicts—the North American colonies—were often less than enthused by the practice. The first act of the Pennsylvania state legislature was to ban the importation of convicts into the state. Early American theorists argued that misbegotten forms of punishment created misshapen citizens, and were evidence of corrupt or inept regimes. In On Crimes and Punishments (1764), Beccaria argued that modern governments needed to punish in ways that were predictable, rational, and proportionate. By following these simple principles, governments would make it possible for people to accept the legitimacy of their punishment, and the authority of the state would not be undone by its response to crime.

There is a perception that today, and for some time, the United States has failed to meet these fundamentals of enlightened government that Beccaria asserted in 1764. This opinion has spread rapidly in the last three or four years in particular, somewhat inexplicably jumping from leftist conferences attended by those dismissed as dangerous or entirely irrelevant radicals to the official editorial column of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The litany of charges is familiar: We have the highest incarceration rate in the world; we are wasting money cycling people in and out of prisons instead of spending on more fruitful activities such as education and infrastructure; disproportionate minority sentencing indicates that we fail the test of equity and have instituted a new form of Jim Crow; stop-and-frisk policies target black male youths who have not committed any crime and violate the tenet of being innocent until proven guilty; and “humane” lethal injections that cause prisoners to die for two hours in agony are both unusual and cruel. One of the few coalitions one can find between liberals and conservatives in the national political landscape these days is an agreement that we spend too much on corrections to little effect.

Three books, Trading Democracy for Justice by Traci Burch, Pulled Over by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald P. Haider-Markel, and On The Run by Alice Goffman, belong at the core of this recent debate, which slowly but surely seems to be nudging the punitive practices of the United States under the glare of more scrutiny. For 30 years, being tough on crime and the war on drugs were so naturalized that questioning them was virtually impossible for anyone within mainstream political discourse. (I was removed from a high school assembly for questioning a speaker on the wisdom of drug sentencing in the 1980s.) Sentencing and policing are starting to be regarded as a constellation of policy choices, instead of unvarying and automatic responses determined by the nature of crime and the character of those who commit it. Reading these books is a reminder of exactly how far we have fallen, and hence how far we have to go before we will be able to achieve Beccaria’s vision. The content of these books provokes despair. The fact that they were written and published is cause for hope; in their own way, all of them move the conversation about policing, incarceration, and crime policy in the United States into new territory.

I begin with a discussion of Trading Democracy for Justice because this book fits seamlessly into established political science literatures on public participation, as it is intended to do. Burch meticulously measures the differential impact of incarceration in localities across the United States. She shows statistically what most of us would guess, that some neighborhoods have a much higher proportion of residents under criminal justice supervision than others, and that these neighborhoods also have more residents removed and sent to correctional facilities than other neighborhoods. Burch carefully researches the different avenues of political participation and finds that there is a ripple effect from criminal supervision throughout the whole neighborhood: “Imprisonment has a particularly strong vicarious effect on participation. For instance, a block group with no prisoners has an average voter turnout that is about 6 percentage points higher than that of block groups with a spatial concentration of 250 prisoners per square mile in North Carolina; in Georgia, the figure is 2 percentage points” (p. 172). She quite specifically does not question the fact that incarceration and criminal supervision are heavily concentrated, she treats them as fact.

Burch argues that the American justice system not only punishes criminals but also punishes those who live near them by dampening their political efficacy: “The central claim of this book is that life in high-imprisonment and high-community-supervision block groups differs from that in low-imprisonment and low-supervision block groups in ways that matter for politics” (p. 73).

The author hopes to achieve two goals with her study, the first of which is to bring the matter of criminal supervision into the purview of democratic theorists and those concerned with the mechanisms of public participation. She rightly asserts that “the criminal justice system has not been given enough attention by scholars of political behavior” (p. 182). Second, Burch wants to raise her readers’ sense of outrage that the American criminal justice system is punishing the innocent. She emphasizes that the dampening impact on political participation is “independent of … personal characteristics” (p. 133), meaning that even those who follow the law are discouraged from participating: “Simply suggesting a reduction in incarceration rates or a change in police practices is not a feasible short- or even medium-term solution to the problem, particularly because doing so is politically impractical and ignores the effects that even community supervision has on political behavior” (p. 169). Burch suggests instead that a strategy of increased mobilization in these neighborhoods can be employed to counteract the reduced political participation she has just demonstrated. As the final sentence of the book suggests, “Encouraging home ownership and development of churches, schools, and civic groups may help offset much of the participation that is lost as a result of a community’s experience with convictions” (p. 183).

The methodology of the book is deliberate and carefully spelled out. The second chapter considers varying interpretations for Burch’s findings, and is compelling in its conclusions and eloquent in its arguments. I can accept the findings of the book, but I struggle with Burch’s fundamental assumptions about punishment and American democracy. She assumes that once this problem of demobilization is made evident, someone will work to change it. Is that not like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse to point out the hyperconcentration of criminal supervision in small blocks and assume that intentional civic mobilization in these neighborhoods can overcome what she labels a “state-led demobilization” (p. 133)? These penal patterns are not random, as her book makes evident; if it is, as she says, “politically unfeasible” to change the concentrated patterns of policing and punishment, why would this same political landscape seek to empower these communities? For example, she interviews Republican officials who explain why they do not work to register voters in these areas: “‘It doesn’t really do us much good to spend a lot of time and energy and resources to go out and register more Democrats than Republicans. We’re not just there to do a public service; we’re there to support Republicans’” (p. 150). Recent attempts to purge voter rolls, require identification cards, and make voting more difficult suggest that mobilization of all citizens is not a principle that can be assumed in this country.

As I write this, Ferguson, Missouri, has had five nights of protests over the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, by the police. Citizens have described the routine searches, stops, and seizures by the police that target young black males in particular. The world has been shocked by images of the militarization and violence of policing in the community. Policing is one of the most frequent ways that the physical movement of people is regulated and the authority of the state is made visible; hence, it is one of the most important institutions of democracy and citizenship in our country that has been largely ignored by political scientists. Pulled Over makes a deceptively easy argument: Police stops create a racialized form of citizenship, and in so doing, generate animosity toward the state. Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel explain that there are two different kinds of police stops, those for violating traffic laws and those that are intended to serve as a pretext for investigating the citizens in the vehicle. One of the most important contributions of this book is to make clear the distinction between these two kinds of stops because most studies do not disaggregate them. Police reports would provide no assistance since interrogatory stops are usually couched as traffic stops. (“I pulled you over because the light over your license plate is burned out.”) The book codes the stops and unsurprisingly finds that minorities are disproportionately stopped for investigatory stops.

Through interviews, the authors carefully establish that the drivers who are stopped can also perceive whether they are being stopped for legitimate traffic violations or not. Investigatory stops raise animosity on the part of those subject to them, regardless of the attitude of the officer conducting them. In the recent debate about stop-and-frisk practices in New York City, one suggestion was that stop and frisk was experienced as racialized due to the racist attitudes of some of the police conducting them. Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel convincingly establish that the entire practice of investigatory police stops is institutionally racialized because it trains officers to target drivers who could potentially be involved in illegal activities: “In investigatory stops, the most important influence on who is stopped is not what you do but who you are: young black men are by far the most likely to be stopped” (p. 14).

Investigatory stops were hailed as an effective way of fighting the war on drugs in the 1990s, and despite multiple studies that show that they do not reduce crime, police still utilize them under the assumption that they are the way to have more proactive policing: “With ‘Operation Pipeline,’ the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] trained ordinary state and local officers to use drug-courier profiles to select drivers for investigatory traffic stops. While the elements of this profile included a number of behavioral characteristics, they also included ethnicity and race: trainers and training films identified Hispanics and African Americans as more likely to be carrying drugs” (p. 33). Pulled Over explains that the DEA trained more than 27,000 state and local police officers in the practice, who then went on to train others.

Impressively, the book’s data establish that African American drivers, in general, are no more angry than Caucasian drivers, in general, when pulled over for clear traffic violations. Equally subtle yet clear analysis indicates that drivers clearly know the kind of stop to which they are being subjected. Escalations between the police and those they are stopping are more likely when police officers are aggressive in their questioning or intrusive in their searches. But the African American community has responded to this practice by doing everything possible to avoid escalations. There are heart-breaking quotes from interviewees who explain repeatedly how “to be nonthreatening” to the police officer that contrast starkly to the stories by white drivers who try to bully their way out of traffic tickets. One black man admitted, “I look for the worst when I’m pulled over by the police. … I try not to move; I try not to do anything that would give them an opportunity to think that I’m gonna try to make a move. And that’s a hell of a way to live” (p. 89). The clear indication that encounters between African Americans and the police constitute a powder keg waiting to explode resonates deeply because of recent deaths at the hands of the police in communities all across the country.

The audience for Pulled Over? This is less clear to me, though the book purports to be addressing those who will make policy for police stops. The idea is that we cannot dismiss the racially charged nature of police stops as attributable to “a few bad apples”—that is, racist police officers. Instead, the problem is systemic, and it stems from the idea that policing today is not supposed to merely respond to crimes and problems as they happen; the police are supposed to stop them before they occur and find criminals before they act. For this reason, as the securitization of policing occurs both domestically and internationally, it is particularly important to think about what proactive policing means in practice; it means having hunches, going on suspicions. I do not believe that “empiricism” is transparent, but this form of policing is especially to be driven by stereotypes. What else could it be based upon after all?

For me, the most important assertion of Pulled Over is that citizens know the difference between being pulled over for a good reason and being pulled over simply to be profiled and/or harassed. We social scientists may need complete statistical analysis to determine whether or not police stops are legitimate; those subject to them do not. Just because a policy, law, practice, or individual can come up with an elaborate explanation of why stop and frisk or investigatory stops are not designed or intended to be racially disproportionate does not mean that that explanation is credible. Those who study and hold authority are more likely to be duped by our own obfuscations about its exercise than anyone subject to it; this is one of the central insights of Beccaria. The troubling problem is that that language of social science has often provided cover for abuses of policing rather than illuminated it, a topic explored cogently by Bernard Harcourt in Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (2007). Pulled Over should be required reading for anyone with a badge in this country, even though its arguments could appear slow-witted to anyone routinely subject to an investigatory stop.

Alice Goffman’s On The Run provides a sharp contrast in method, even if its topic and concerns are closely related to the other two books. It has provoked a great deal of attention, including a discussion by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. It was a thoroughly rattling experience to read this book, particularly because I realized from her descriptions of what she called “6th Street” that I was living seven blocks away from Goffman while writing a book called Punishment and Political Order (2007). West Philadelphia is where academic pretensions and conventions are spatially pushed into the gritty realities of postindustrial urban poverty. The two arenas are largely segregated by race and mutual incomprehension, even though they exist one or two blocks from each other. Goffman managed to straddle both of these worlds for six years, first as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and then as a graduate student in sociology at Princeton. She eventually became roommates with two of the subjects of her study, “Mike” and “Chuck.”

Goffman became a tutor to a girl named Aisha in her sophomore year, and through her connection to that family became acquainted with the neighborhood, and eventually adopted as a sort of little sister to Mike. This gave her access to the community even if she admits she never “blended in.” It soon became clear to her that this impoverished neighborhood’s legal entanglements had come to define every single aspect of individual and collective life: “Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, Mike spent about three and a half years in jail or prison. Out of the 139 weeks that he was not incarcerated, he spent 87 weeks on probation or parole for five overlapping sentences. He spent 35 weeks with a warrant out for his arrest, and had a total of ten warrants issued on him. He also had at least fifty-one court appearances over this five-year period, forty-seven of which I attended,” (pp. 17–18). As this list indicates, dealing with his legal issues was a pretty all-consuming practice for Mike, somewhat like K. in Kafka’s The Trial, who spends all of his time working on his case even though he does not know what he is accused of having done.

The goal of Goffman’s book is to methodically reveal what it means to live with an open warrant, or what is termed “running.” If you are pulled over while driving (see Pulled Over), or caught with an open container, or are with someone who has roused the suspicion of the police, or draw the attention of authorities in any way, you could be arrested. If you are at work and a robbery takes place, the police might run your name through their system and arrest you. Hospitals are prime locations for the police to look for those with open warrants: “According to the officers I interviewed, it is standard practice in the hospitals serving the Black community for police to run the names of visitors or patients while they are waiting around” (p. 34). If you break your arm by falling over, you would not go to the hospital for treatment. If your grandmother is in the hospital, you do not go visit her. And if your child is being born, you do not attend, unless you are willing to risk arrest.

In a surreal passage, Goffman describes a conversation between a mother about to give birth and her own mother as they evaluate the father’s decision not to come to the hospital: “‘He don’t care. I mean, he care, but he don’t care enough. He going to say “If I get locked up, how I’ma take care of the baby?” It’s not like they got him on a body [a murder case] or something—if they did come grab him [arrest him at the hospital], all he would do is sit for a quick three months.’” Her mother replies, “‘But think about it, like, in ten years when he looks back he’s going to wish he saw his baby born, he’s not going to care he was sitting [was in jail] for a couple of months.’” (p. 125). Imagine the calculation yourself: Would you trade months in jail to be present at your child’s birth?

An angry girlfriend, a surly little brother, a friend who might be mad that you have not paid back a debt, or anyone with a grudge against you for any reason can call the police and turn you in. It slowly becomes clear that the fact of endless legal entanglements fundamentally alters not only individual possibilities and choices but also every relationship between people in the neighborhood: “Whether a man’s friends, relatives, or girlfriend bring him to the attention of the authorities because the police pressure then to do so or because they leverage his wanted status to control or punish him, he comes to regard those closest to him as potential informants” (p. 37). The cycling in and out of correctional facilities places strains on emotional and sexual relationships, for obvious reasons, but also because the police repeatedly approach the girlfriends and mothers of those they are pursuing. Their top three threats are arrest, eviction, or loss of child custody. Repeated visits, pressure, and physical intimidation can produce information about a man’s whereabouts form those close to him. Goffman describes multiple instances when lovers had to repair their relationship after the female gave the male up for arrest under duress from the police or because they were frightened for the safety of their lovers and decided they would be safer in jail or prison. Imagine having to negotiate the criminal justice system as a third partner in every relationship you have.

Running also creates a plethora of business opportunities for the community. Goffman describes one boy who has a lucrative profession of imitating people on the phone when their parole officers call, and others sell clean urine for those on the way to drug tests. Photo identifications are needed and also feared because they reveal who you are even though they provide a passport to the possibility of employment. “Clean” identifications can be procured. On the other hand, holding routine employment is dangerous because the police can easily find out your schedule and arrest you at work: “Once a man fears he will be taken by the police, it is precisely a stable and public daily routine of work and family life, with all the paper trail that it entails, that allows the police to locate him” (p. 53).

Goffman describes how the common situation of living under the constant threat of arrest leads boys under the age of 10 to start planning their escape routes during police raids, and infuses the culture of the neighborhood: “The first week I spent on 6th Street I saw two boys, five and seven years old, play a game of chase in which one boy assumed the role of the cop who must run after the other. When the ‘cop’ caught up to the other child, he pushed him down and cuffed him with imaginary handcuffs. He then patted down the other child and felt in his pockets, asking if he had warrants, or was carrying a gun or any drugs. The child then took a quarter out of the other child’s pocket, laughing and yelling ‘I’m seizing that!’… I once saw a six year old pull another child’s pants down to do a ‘cavity search’” (p. 21).

The New York Times praised the book but was deeply troubled by the fact that Goffman lost all boundaries in the course of her research, pointing out that she was present at a murder, hid fugitives, and was a participant-observer as countless laws were broken. This is not your average academic research agenda. She straddled two worlds while researching and writing the book, and her methodological notes describe her increasing inability to segregate the two. She started to lose interest in her academic pursuits and was unable to remember appointments with her advisor: “What concerned me was not so much that I’d missed these meetings with a professor I greatly admired, but that I couldn’t find it in myself to feel bad about it” (p. 244). I cannot imagine worrying about proper footnoting for my senior thesis while attending sentencing hearings and having my apartment raided by the police. Goffman admits to experiencing the strain of straddling the world of academia and the 6th Street community, developing a visceral fear of white men after spending so much time avoiding the police, “and making a mental note of the TVs and computers I could steal if I ever needed cash in a hurry” in her department at Princeton (p. 247).

The book acquires a sense of science fiction in moving back and forth from one parallel planet to the other. And like science fiction authors, Goffman is able to display what we take for granted as tough-on-crime policing as utterly bizarre. It is hard to imagine what Michel Foucault would make of policing that makes it impossible to live a normative life such as having employment, a routine, and family relationships.

On the Run is the equivalent of throwing a bomb in the middle of the debate about penality. Trading Democracy for Justice and Pulled Over utilize social science methods to dissect particular aspects and products of our criminal policy and demonstrate that they are often counterproductive. All of the authors assume that these policies are being pursued for rational reasons and that policymakers will respond to rational arguments about their impact. Goffman displays how far we have come from any sort of rhyme or reason whatsoever.