Book Talk | David Garland & Robert J. Sampson | Law and Order Leviathan & Marked by Time

IPK will host a dual book talk with David Garland, author of Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment, and Robert J. Sampson, author of Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans, on Monday, March 9 (5:30 PM). Patrick Sharkey will moderate the discussion.

David Garland, widely considered one of the world’s leading scholars of crime and punishment, is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Professor of Sociology in NYU’s Department of Sociology. Garland is the author of a series of award-winning books, including Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (1st edition, 1985; new edition 2018); Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (1990); The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (2001); Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010); and The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (2016) each of which has been translated into several languages. He has been elected to membership of learned societies in both the United States and the United Kingdom, being a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Garland was a Davis Fellow at Princeton University’s History Department and a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow. His current work focuses on comparative and structural explanations of America’s distinctive use of policing and punishment and on the genealogy of the idea of the “welfare state” in British political discourse. His latest book, entitled Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment was published by Princeton University Press in the Fall of 2025.

Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard. He is also an Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, founding director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, and Scientific Director of the ongoing Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. He taught previously at the University of Chicago. Professor Sampson is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society of Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and, as Corresponding Fellow, the British Academy. He is the former President of the American Society of Criminology and in 2011 he received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. His research and teaching cover a variety of areas including crime and criminal justice, the life course and social change, neighborhood effects, collective civic engagement, inequality, and urban social structure. He is the author of numerous articles and multiple award-winning books, including Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (2nd edition, 2024), published by the University of Chicago Press. His newest book, published in February 2026 from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, is Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans.

Patrick Sharkey is an American urban sociologist and criminologist. He is a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and was formerly Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, with an affiliation at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Sharkey’s research focuses on crime, policing, and public safety. He leads Americanviolence.org—a project which maps fatal shootings in the United States. Sharkey is the author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, published in 2018 by W.W. Norton. His first book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, was published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. Sharkey is the Scientific Director for Crime Lab New York City. He was previously the Director for the Institute for Human Development and Social Change at New York University, a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars Program Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia University from 2007 to 2009, and a research assistant at the Urban Institute in Washington D.C. Labor and Social Policy Center from 2000 to 2002.