Event details

The Moffett Lecture Series aims to foster reflection about moral issues in public life, broadly construed, at either a theoretical or a practical level, and in the history of thought about these issues. The series is made possible by a gift from the Whitehall Foundation in honor of James A. Moffett ’29.

Why Americans Tolerate Such a Monstrous Penal State

Millions of Americans, mostly people of color, are segregated in harsh penal confinement. Police killings are at levels seen nowhere else in the developed world. Predatory justice extorts revenue from offenders and their families. Collateral consequences exclude millions of ex-offenders from mainstream society. Death penalties and whole-life sentences imposed long after they’ve been abolished elsewhere…. The persistence of these peculiarly American phenomena raises a question that is as much moral as it is sociological: how could such a monstrous penal state be tolerated by majorities of Americans and their political representatives? In this year’s Moffett lecture, I explore the social sources of public indifference and what might be done to address them.

David Garland, New York University

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. His most recent book is Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton University Press, 2025).