As we write, about 3% of all American adults are under the supervision of correctional authorities, a quarter of youth have been arrested by the time they reach young adulthood, and 1.5 million black men have “disappeared” from public space owing in no small part to either incarceration or early death. Around the country, communities have risen in protest against police violence, and revelations have emerged that governments like Ferguson, Missouri, a small suburb of just over 20,000 people, managed to collect 2.6 million dollars in fines and fees for mostly minor transgressions. Yet while scholars in sociology and economics have produced major works on the criminal justice system’s many consequences for social and economic life (e.g., Bruce Western; Todd Clear; Loic Wacquant), political science has been remarkably silent.

A handful of scholars in our discipline have endeavored to examine the carceral state’s effects on democratic life. However, their focus has been primarily on formal exclusion from the vote and the social safety net; the political implications of felon disenfranchisement in particular are clear, easily measured, and provide an especially stark contrast to democratic ideals (Marc Meredith and Michael Morse; Khalilah Brown-Dean; Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen; Alec Ewald; Michael Leo Owens; Becky Pettit). Policing and incarceration also deepened the political isolation of neighborhoods, affecting the capacity of communities to build social capital, maintain social bonds, and mobilize for the common good (Traci Burch, Trading Democracy for Justice: Criminal Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation, 2013; Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse, 2009; Amy E. Lerman, The Modern Prison Paradox: Politics, Punishment and American Community, 2013; Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver, “Staying Out of Sight? Concentrated Policing and Local Political Action,” 2014). To the extent that criminal justice was important, the implicit argument went, it was because of the “vanishing” voter or absent joiner.

By homing in on how policies have transformed the bedrock of political life—voting—scholars (unwittingly) ceded the bigger picture of criminal justice, giving the distinct impression that it mattered only insofar as it bore down on the instrumental outcomes political scientists care most about: how much particular social groups engage in the democratic community through voting, joining, and equality in representation, and how much their exclusion matters for policy outputs and electoral outcomes.

Our primary argument in Arresting Citizenship is that the rise of the carceral state not only excludes citizens, it also produces them; encounters with criminal justice institutions deeply affect how people conceive of their citizenship, what they come to believe about government, and most importantly, how willing they are to make political claims. This broader socialization, difficult to capture from surveys and voter behavior alone, results in a qualitatively different set of political ideas; criminal justice for some is a defining political experience.

For custodial citizens, their government was not one that overtaxed them (as in middle class complaints about intrusive government), or that exceeded its authority (as in Tea Party objections about big government), or that did not adequately come to their aid (as in accounts of the state from those at the bottom of the class distribution). And disengagement did not, we learned, stem only from perceptions of futility or the belief that officials would not respond to their concerns. It also arose out of an active recoiling from agents of the state who wielded an invasive, retributive, and seemingly pervasive power over citizens’ lives. Government was the “kingpin,” the “top dog that calls all the shots,” where you had to “shut up and listen” and “stay under the radar.”

We hope Arresting Citizenship, Caught, and The First Civil Right provide a new framework to those in our subfield, and we are heartened that others have begun to engage with the pressing problems of inequality, state development, and political power that are manifested in the domain of criminal justice. We hope that in so doing, political science can continue to bring important features of political life into clearer view.

In particular, the “diminished democracy” that citizens experience is not in the main (or not only) a passive process whereby government responds to some and not others, where policies and politicians are allowed to drift away from the median voter, and where well-heeled groups exert outsized voice in electoral and policy outcomes. Again bringing to mind the case of Ferguson, we see that crime control is also an active project of state discipline and surveillance. State institutions are constitutive spaces where people navigate government, see how the state relates to their communities, learn whether they are valued by government, derive a sense of identity and group position, and “experience” democracy at work.

We concluded Arresting Citizenship by briefly discussing potentially promising avenues for reform. That both Marie Gottschalk and Naomi Murakawa reference this aspect of our work reflects (we believe) the sense of frustration that many scholars share when contrasting the now weighty evidence documenting systemic failures of American crime control against the seeming impotence of the reform movement to achieve any real change; as Gottschalk notes, the bipartisan efforts now underway have so far been more rhetoric than action. She suggests that we are overly optimistic in implying that a window of opportunity has arrived, and she is right to remind readers that the last effort for sweeping reform only swelled the prison system. In contrast, Murakawa thinks that we are not nearly ambitious enough in our proposed reform agenda.

We emphatically agree (and, indeed, make clear in our book) that the most obvious priority for reforming criminal justice is a drastic reduction in the numbers who have contact with these institutions, and a tightening of the link between those who commit grave crimes and those who are surveilled, arrested, and confined. We and others have called for sentencing reform, decarceration, and the reigning in of vertical patrols and stop-and-frisk programs that sweep wide swaths of the public into the net of surveillance and punishment. But the reforms we imagine in our book necessarily go further than retrenchment. They would force us to acknowledge that criminal justice is no longer tangential to governance in America, nor are its institutions just separate silos of American government that are inconsequential for other aspects of the political project. Rather, they are an integral part of the way that political power in this country is both deployed and experienced.

One central implication of our book is this: Our nation’s political institutions must represent the aspirational values of our representative democracy. This has symbolic value, in that the culture of political institutions is the primary way in which a society’s core political principles are made real. Through its actions, not just its words, a nation projects to its citizens and the world what it values.

Ensuring that our political institutions reflect our political norms also has instrumental value, however. The character of political institutions is central to the functioning of the system itself, as the values and logics enshrined in the system help that particular system to flourish. For a democracy to thrive, it requires democratic citizens who actively engage in the enterprise of civic life. In contrast, for an authoritarian state to sustain itself, it must only assure complacency and compliance from the people under its control. Our book traces the many ways in which criminal justice institutions are implicated in the type of citizen our nation produces.

Murakawa asks whether “democratic values would reduce the actuality of high arrest rates of black youth.” We reply that they must. Any other reading of “democratic values” mistakenly equates it with bureaucratic processes. Nor can the discussion begin and end with felon disenfranchisement and other policies of formal exclusion. (Imagine if comparativists who studied authoritarian or democratizing regimes concerned themselves only with access to the ballot as solely defining citizens’ relationship to the state!)

At its core, politics is about power and the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Political science is therefore about trying to understand and explain the ways that communities and societies structure, institutionalize, and enforce power relationships toward the task of shared governance. These are issues in which American systems of crime control are deeply and perhaps inextricably implicated.