A Review of Recent Historical Scholarship on Racial Criminalization and Punitive Policy in the United States

• In Event: Policy Panel: History and Justice Reform: Sustaining Transformation through Reckoning

Abstract

The United States is the most punitive country in the world. By population, by per capita rates and by
expenditures, the United exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented
immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision. Over the past two decades, there has been an
explosion of reports by government agencies, non-profits, and international advocacy organizations exploring the
dimensions of what is unquestionably a peculiar form of American exceptionalism. While empirical and comparative
data on the size and scope of the American system and its many “clients” will continue to lie at the heart of many of
these reports, only within the past decade has research on the historical roots of American punitiveness gained
increasing attention.

Author

• Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Harvard University