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The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War. By Michael S. Sherry

To live in the United States is to live in an intensely punitive society. This country has incarcerated millions over the past several decades. Historians have turned their attention to this growing phenomenon in recent years. As a topic that crosses subfields, scholarship on “the carceral state” has rapidly become one of the burgeoning areas of U.S. history. Although nearly all who study the rise of the carceral state would agree that the cultural dimensions of this shift matter, until now, nobody has written a single study tabulating and analyzing them. For that reason, The Punitive Turn in American Life is an important complement to existing scholarship, filling in what has often been a palpable absence. Its fundamental premise is crucial: the militaristic U.S. posture toward the rest of the world helps explain the carceral state. Michael S. Sherry retired from Northwestern University in 2020, where he taught for 44 years. The winner of a Bancroft Prize and an openly gay historian, Sherry has made numerous important contributions to the study of U.S. history. He was a member of a cohort of scholars who opened up and diversified foreignrelations history, introducing new analytic tools. The Punitive Turn in American Life is a descendant of his landmark book on the political culture of war-making and national security from the 1930s to the 1990s, In the Shadow of War. This book also focuses on political culture, illustrating how the dominance of war-making in U.S. political culture shaped the punitive turn. (Sherry prefers this term to “carceral state,” which is widely used but infrequently defined.) His argument is that the punitive turn resulted from the conflation of war-making and crime-fighting from the 1960s to the present. The consequences were both the massive growth in incarceration and the “militarization” of law enforcement. The political culture of war-making outlasted the apogee of U.S. militarism, the war in Southeast Asia. After that war’s end left a number of state capacities in surplus, the dominance of war metaphors in orienting Americans’ understandings of politics and society helped transfer and redeploy those surpluses to fighting wars on crime and drugs. In addition to “unplanned and contingent shifts in political culture” (5), new mass cultural products offered a simplistic lens for understanding complex social problems. Nearly every transgression was crime, interpersonal violence was a pervasive threat, and state violence was therefore the answer: this was the prospectus for innumerable movies and television shows.