Preface

When we took up our posts as editors-in-chief of Punishment & Society: The International Journal of Penology, we set out to revive and promote a format that had featured at various points throughout the history of our journal and which we found particularly interesting.This involves organising Review Symposiums on books that we consider particularly significant for this field of study and which have been published recently, in which various researchers can offer comments and critiques, followed by the opportunity for the authors to respond to these in a final contribution.We also thought that this could take as its starting point the organisation of online 'Author Meets Critics' (AMC) sessions organised by P&S, in which authors and commentators would take part but which would be open to debate with anyone interested in studies on punishment and society.We began with our first AMC online session in September 2025.It was no coincidence that the first book we chose for this new format was David Garland's latest publication, Law and Order Leviathan: America's Extraordinary Regime of Police and Punishment (Princeton University Press, 2025).Garland is probably the contemporary author who has contributed most to consolidating studies on punishment and society.This endeavour reached a crucial milestone, of course, precisely through his founding of Punishment and Society: The International Journal of Penology in 1999 and subsequently serving as its first editor-in-chief, thereby providing a platform for regular scholarly publication that has become central to researchers in this field worldwide.At the same time, his theoretical contributions since the 1980s have been, and continue to be, a point of reference for many of the debates that researchers on punishment and society have been conducting for over 40 years.One need only recall the significance of Punishment and Modern Society: A Study of Social Theory (Garland, 1990), which provided an analytical map of theoretical traditions in the social sciences that had, up to that point, ventured to examine punishment; this has served as a guide for generations of students and researchers, whilst also proposing innovative approaches to key overarching issues that generated considerable interest and debate.Or his works on penal change at different historical junctures.