| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark E. Kann. Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power in the Early American Republic. New York: New York University Press. 2005. Pp. ix, 337. $50.00.
Mark E. Kann has written a fascinating, thought-provoking, and timely political-historical study of penal thought and practice in the formative years of the United States. The disgraceful state of U.S. criminal justice after decades of the "War on Crime," with world-leading incarcerations rates, millions of persons in prison, millions more under penal supervision of some kind or another, further millions condemned to suffer civil death of disenfranchisement, and appalling percentages of the black male population behind bars: all this cries out for historical investigation. How could things have gone so terribly wrong?	1
Searching for answers to this question, James Q. Whitman recently turned to comparative history to argue that differences in penal policy between the United States, on the one hand, and Germany and France, on the other, reflected broader differences in the processes of democratization (Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe [2003]). According to Whitman's nuanced account, in Europe (respectful) criminal punishments once reserved for the upper classes were extended to all citizens as part of a general societal process of leveling up, while in the U.S. (demeaning) criminal punishments once reserved for the lower classes were extended to all citizens, in a general process of leveling down.	. . .

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