The shift begins at 11:39 p.m. That number comes from a labor contract, and it tells you something about police work before you see any of it. Nothing in patrol runs on round numbers. The officer signs out a car, checks the shotgun, and drives into Baltimore's Eastern District, a few square miles of row houses east of downtown where, at the end of the 1990s, the drug corners run all night.
From the corner, the patrol car is weather. A lookout on a stoop calls out when it turns onto the block. The tout who steers customers goes quiet. The man holding the money keeps holding it, because money is legal. The slinger who hands over the vials has only a few on him; the stash sits in a rain spout or under the lip of a windowsill on a vacant house. The gun stays close but off the body, behind a loose brick, because a gun on the body is five years and a gun behind a brick belongs to no one. The car rolls past. The corner exhales and reopens. Total interruption of commerce: about ninety seconds.
The officer in the car during those years was sometimes a Harvard doctoral student named Peter Moskos (b. 1971). He wore the uniform, carried the gun, made the arrests, went to court, and depended on the men and women of his squad to come when he called for help. He served from 1999 to 2001, most of it on the permanent midnight shift, 11:39 p.m. to 8:12 a.m. He came out of the Eastern District with a dissertation, then a book, then a career built on a question he has been working for twenty-five years: under what conditions do police prevent crime, and under what conditions do they just generate activity?
He is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, director of its executive master's program for NYPD leadership, a faculty member in the CUNY Graduate Center's sociology program, a senior fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project, and, since 2025, the official historian of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection Police. His fourth book, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop (Oxford University Press, 2025), is an oral history of the largest crime decline in modern American urban history. His description of his own method, posted on his faculty page, runs against forty years of disciplinary fashion. He studies people by talking to them.
The method is inherited. Moskos grew up in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Charles Moskos (1934-2008), a Northwestern sociologist who became the country's leading student of military life. Charles Moskos did his research in mess halls and barracks and troop transports, interviewing enlisted men where they lived. He helped design the "don't ask, don't tell" compromise of the Clinton years, a policy that made him famous and, in time, notorious. Whatever one concludes about that policy, the research style behind it had a signature: go where the institution lives, learn its internal codes, take the members' own account of their work as data worth having. Peter's mother, Ilca, taught foreign languages in high school. Politics and institutions were dinner-table subjects. Peter has joked that the apple did not fall far from the tree. His father studied the men society sends to do its violence abroad. He studies the men and women society sends to manage its violence at home.
The route ran through Princeton, where he graduated magna cum laude in sociology in 1994 and won the Isadore Brown Thesis Award, and then Harvard, where he entered the doctoral program in 1995. He also spent 1997 and 1998 doing participant observation with police in Amsterdam, studying a Dutch program that put officers on foot and bicycles, and he worked restaurant and bar jobs and helped found a boat club that ran informal canal tours. This last item reads like a resume joke until you see the pattern. Moskos learns institutions from inside their service entrances.
The timing of his graduate education mattered. When he arrived at Harvard, crime in New York City was collapsing, and the discipline he had joined could not explain it. The reigning theories held that crime grew from root causes, poverty, inequality, family structure, demography, and that police were a response to crime, never a cause of its rise or fall. But New York's poverty had not vanished. Its inequality had widened. Its schools had not been transformed. And its murders were falling by half and then by half again. Either something was wrong with the theory or something was happening inside the institutions the theory ignored.
Moskos went to find out. His original plan was modest: observe recruits in the Baltimore Police Department's academy and study how civilians become cops. The department approved, then bureaucratic complications threatened his access, and officials made a counteroffer that no dissertation committee could have designed. If he wanted to study recruits, he could become one. The department expedited his hiring and waived the two-year commitment. In 1999 he entered the academy and told his classmates what he was: a Harvard researcher who would also be, for as long as he wore the uniform, a real police officer.
The academy taught him mostly what academies teach, which in his account was chain of command, shoe shining, staying awake, and forms of address, with street policing left to the street. Some of his classmates stayed with him as people. He opens Cop in the Hood with Crystal Sheffield, who sat next to him and refused the petty feuds of fifty people cooped up in one room. "I love everybody here," she would say, and she meant it. She was later killed in the line of duty. He dedicated the book to her and to the nine other Baltimore officers killed since his tenure. The dedication does the work that a chapter of methodology could not. He had classmates, and some of them died doing the job he wrote about.
After six months of training he was assigned to the Eastern District, a district about 97 percent Black, poor, and saturated with open-air drug markets. There he made the observations that became his dissertation, completed in 2004 under the title "Police in the 'Hood: Drug Laws, Police Discretion, and Arresting African-Americans," and then Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District (Princeton University Press, 2008), which won the PROSE Award for the year's best scholarly book in sociology.
Two findings organize the book, and neither flatters anyone's politics.
The first concerns money. Moskos found that one of the strongest predictors of whether an officer made discretionary arrests was how that officer felt about court. An arrest generates court dates. Court dates on the midnight shift mean showing up at 9 a.m. after working until 8:12, and they pay overtime. Officers who wanted the money went looking for arrests. Officers who wanted their days off avoided arrests that a warning could handle. The same block, the same law, the same department, and two officers producing opposite enforcement patterns because of a payroll rule. Reformers write policies about race and force. The officers were also responding to time-and-a-half.
The second concerns race, and it cuts in a direction that satisfies neither side of the standard argument. Moskos argues that drug enforcement produces racial disparity even when individual officers act without racial prejudice, because the law itself is aimed at conduct that is visible in poor Black neighborhoods and invisible in rich White ones. The Eastern District's drug trade ran on corners because its customers had no living rooms to sell from and its economy had little else. A suburban dealer works by phone behind a front door. Police arrest what they can see. The disparity is built into the design of prohibition, which means it survives every sensitivity training and every bias audit, because the officers were never the main source of it.
From this second finding came the position that separated Moskos from law-and-order politics for good: he wants drugs legalized. His argument owes nothing to claims that drugs are harmless. It runs through violence. Prohibition hands a large industry to people who cannot call the police when they are robbed or sue when a contract is broken, so they enforce their contracts with guns. Arrest a slinger and the corner replaces him by morning; the demand is still there and the profit is still there. Moskos distinguishes decriminalizing possession, which spares users but leaves the market in criminal hands, from legalizing supply, which attacks the economics that make the trade violent. For years he spoke for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of police and former police who reached the same conclusion from the same vantage: they had fought the drug war and watched it lose.
He joined John Jay College in 2004, made full professor in 2018, and chaired his department from 2018 to 2021. Since 2017 he has run the NYPD Executive Master's Leadership Program, which puts him in a seminar room with captains and inspectors and chiefs, the people who will run the largest police department in the country. The arrangement gives him something almost no academic critic of policing has: continuous access to how commanders think, and continuous exposure to their view of him.
In 2011 he published the book that made him briefly famous and permanently misquotable. In Defense of Flogging (Basic Books) proposed that anyone sentenced to prison be offered a choice: serve the term, or take two lashes per year of the sentence and go home. Five years or ten lashes. Reviewers reached for their smelling salts, then read the book and found the trap. Moskos expected nearly everyone to choose the lash, and the choice was the argument. If a rational person prefers being whipped to serving the sentence, then the sentence is worse than a whipping, and a society that recoils from the whip while imposing the sentence has confused squeamishness with humanity. Prison destroys years, families, employment, and minds, and does it out of sight, on an administrative schedule, in language borrowed from accounting. The lash is honest about being violence. Critics answered that a choice between two state punishments is no choice, that flogging in America could never escape the imagery of slavery, and that governments given a new instrument of violence keep it. The criticisms land against the proposal and slide off the diagnosis. Mother Jones put the book on its list of favorites for 2011. The Atlantic named him one of its "Brave Thinkers." The flogging proposal remains the best sorting device in his bibliography: readers who finish it angry at Moskos have usually skipped the chapters on what prison does.
Between the police books came a family obligation. Greek Americans: Struggle and Success, originally his father's book, appeared in a third edition in 2013 with Peter as co-author, updated and extended with his own account of later-generation Greek-American life. He has lived for years in Astoria, Queens, the historic center of Greek New York. The book treats ethnic persistence the way he treats everything: identity survives through institutions, churches, families, and repeated practice, or it does not survive.
His position on street policing is easiest to see through what he rejects on each side. He defends the broken-windows idea in its original form: visible disorder makes public space unusable, and the people most harmed are those who cannot buy their way out of public space, the people on the bus, in the park, on the stoop. A man screaming threats on the subway is depriving every other rider of something real. But he calls New York's stop-and-frisk era of the 2000s a debacle, and his explanation of how it happened is organizational rather than moral. The department began counting stops as proof of work. Once a stop became a recorded unit of productivity, officers produced stops the way factories produce parts, hundreds of thousands a year, most of them yielding nothing, falling on young Black and Hispanic men, and teaching a generation that a police encounter is something done to you for a supervisor's spreadsheet. In his account, the tactic did not fail because order maintenance is wrong. It failed because a measurement system detached the activity from any problem it was meant to solve. This is the same finding as the court-overtime finding, scaled up from one officer's paycheck to a department of 35,000: police do what the incentives pay for, and the incentives are set by people who rarely think about what they are buying.
That analysis is the spine of Back from the Brink. The book asks how New York City went from 2,245 murders in 1990 to under 300 in recent years, and it answers through the people who were in the room, more than a hundred interviews with cops, chiefs, transit officials, and city hands. Its central figures are William Bratton (b. 1947) and Jack Maple (1952-2001), the dandyish transit lieutenant in a homburg and bow tie who sketched the future of American policing on a napkin at Elaine's: accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment, effective tactics, relentless follow-up. Out of that came CompStat, the weekly meetings at One Police Plaza where precinct commanders stood at a podium in front of maps of their own crime and answered for it. The meetings were brutal. Careers ended at that podium. But the message underneath the brutality was new: the department now believed crime could be reduced, and reducing it was every commander's job. The old NYPD had treated crime as weather and a commander's job as answering calls and avoiding scandal. The new one treated crime as a problem with locations, patterns, and names.
Moskos argues that this internal transformation, along with a wider civic one, the reclaimed subway, the redesigned Bryant Park, the remade Times Square, drove a decline that came earlier and fell steeper in New York than demographics, the economy, lead, or abortion can explain, since those forces operated everywhere and the New York drop stood out anyway. He does not claim single causation; he claims the institution mattered, against a scholarly tradition that had defined it out of the equation. And he is unsentimental about what happened next: CompStat, built to solve problems, decayed into the numbers machine that produced mass stop-and-frisk, its own corruption. The Wall Street Journal called the book a delight. David Simon (b. 1960), whose portrait of Baltimore policing is considerably darker, praised it. So did Bratton, which tells you the book's risk: an oral history of a victory, told by the victors, needs a skeptical editor, and Moskos serves as both advocate and editor. He lets the cops talk at length, treats their operational knowledge as knowledge, and accepts that some of them are polishing their own monuments. He would rather run that risk than the opposite one, the literature in which policing is analyzed for decades without anyone asking a police officer how anything works.
The events of 2020 hardened his public role. When murders rose nearly 30 percent nationwide, the largest one-year increase on record, Moskos said the quiet part in plain sentences: if you delegitimize police, pull them back from proactive work, and prosecute less, more people get shot, and the people who get shot are not the people writing the op-eds. He assembled the Violence Reduction Project, an edited collection of short proposals from cops, academics, and street outreach workers, organized around one premise: cities cannot wait for poverty and inequality to be solved before addressing the shootings happening this year. The proposals run from focused deterrence and foot patrol to violence interrupters, domestic-violence risk screening, and cold-case squads, and they share two empirical commitments. Violence concentrates, in small networks and on particular blocks, so intervention can be focused instead of falling on whole communities. And unsolved shootings are their own engine of violence, because a neighborhood where murders go uncleared learns that cooperation is pointless and retaliation is the only justice on offer.
He keeps returning to one number. In April 2026 he noted that 96 percent of New York City's shooting victims were Black or Hispanic. The criminal-justice debate measures racial inequality in stops, arrests, and prison terms, and he accepts those measures. He insists on adding the other one. A policy that reduces police contacts while more residents of Brownsville get shot is not, on his arithmetic, racially progressive. Whether that arithmetic is right is the live argument between Moskos and his structuralist critics, who answer that his account underweights what generations of enforcement did to those same neighborhoods, and that legitimacy lost is itself a cause of violence. It is a real argument, and unlike most arguments in this field, both sides of it are counting bodies.
His support for policing has never extended to every agency with a badge. In March 2026 he co-wrote a criticism of ICE and Border Patrol operations in Minneapolis, arguing that aggressive federal enforcement under poor leadership was manufacturing street confrontations that competent police work avoids. He has been skeptical of deploying the National Guard as theater, soldiers without local knowledge, investigative capacity, or community ties standing in for the municipal institution that should be doing the work. And in June 2026 he wrote about Baltimore's steep recent drop in murders, a development with private weight for him. He once expected to write about a Baltimore crime decline that never came. When it finally came, a quarter century after his midnight shifts, he credited institutional work, not tide.
Across the books and the blog and the podcast, one target stays constant, and it is distance. The academic who has never sat in a patrol car theorizes the officer. The chief on the fourteenth floor forgets the sergeant's math. The reformer who is safe at home discounts the woman who calls 911 about the corner because the corner is outside her door. The public supports prison sentences whose contents it has arranged never to see. Every Moskos project is an attempt to close one of those gaps by going where the institution lives and asking the people inside how it works, then checking their answers against what he can see. His father did it with soldiers. He does it with cops.
The result fits no coalition, which is why every coalition can quote him and none will claim him. Abolitionists reject his premise that policing is indispensable. Structural sociologists find his managerialism thin on political economy. Police unions have no use for a man who calls the drug war lost, prisons a moral evasion, and stop-and-frisk a self-inflicted wound. Prison reformers admire the indictment and cannot forgive the lash. His claim survives the crossfire because it is small and testable. Good policing saves lives. Bad policing manufactures illegitimacy at public expense. Less policing is not reform and more enforcement is not safety. The work is telling the difference, and you cannot tell the difference from a distance.
The Curtain and the Lash: Peter Moskos Through Norbert Elias
In 1939 a Jewish refugee from Breslau published a two-volume work in Basel arguing that Europeans had, over five centuries, tamed their impulses, pacified their societies, and pushed violence to the margins of everyday life. The timing buried the book. Europe was mobilizing for the largest organized killing in its history, the author’s mother would die at Auschwitz, and a theory of advancing self-restraint looked like a bad joke told at the worst moment. Norbert Elias spent the next thirty years in academic obscurity, teaching in Leicester, unknown in his own field. Then the book was reissued in 1969, translated into English through the 1970s, and The Civilizing Process became one of the works that sociology now argues with rather than about. Elias lived long enough to watch the rehabilitation. He died in Amsterdam in 1990, in the city where Peter Moskos would ride along with Dutch police seven years later.
The theory runs like this. Medieval Europeans lived amid casual violence and did not much mind. Knights fought for pleasure and profit. Meals came to the table as whole animals, carved before the diners. Bodily functions occurred in company. People wept, raged, and struck one another with a freedom that later centuries would find animal. What changed was structure before it was psychology. As kings broke the warrior nobility and established what Max Weber (1864-1920) would later call the monopoly of legitimate force, social spaces became pacified. A noble who could no longer fight his way to standing had to please, calculate, and wait. Court society rewarded foresight and self-command. Manners books, beginning with Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and his 1530 tract on boys’ conduct, taught each generation to be disgusted by what the previous one had done at table. The constraints worked their way inward and downward, from external compulsion to habit, from court to bourgeoisie to everyone. Elias tracked the change through the humblest evidence in the history of sociology: instructions about spitting, nose-blowing, and the fork.
Two of his findings do the work here. First, the civilizing process does not abolish the distasteful. It relocates it. The whole carved animal gives way to boneless cuts prepared out of sight; the slaughterhouse moves outside town; sex, death, and punishment retreat into private rooms and specialized institutions. Elias called this the movement of segregation, the hiding of the distasteful “behind the scenes of social life.” Second, what advances is the threshold of repugnance. Each generation recoils at sights the last one tolerated. And because the recoil tracks visibility rather than quantity, a society can grow more squeamish while paying for as much violence as before, or more, so long as the violence is administered somewhere else, by someone else, behind something.
Read Elias, then read Moskos, and the flogging book stops looking like a provocation and starts looking like an experiment, a measurement of exactly the threshold Elias described.
Begin where the curtain closed. On August 14, 1936, some twenty thousand people gathered in Owensboro, Kentucky, to watch the hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black man in his twenties convicted of rape and murder. Vendors worked the crowd. The national press covered it as a carnival and a disgrace. It was the last public execution in the United States. The gallows moved inside prison walls, then execution moved to midnight, then to the electric chair, then to a gurney and a catheter and a procedure deliberately staged to resemble medicine, witnessed by a handful of people behind glass. Each step was announced as humanity. Each step was also, in Elias’s terms, segregation: the state kept killing, and arranged for refined people not to see it. The penal historians who applied Elias to this record, Pieter Spierenburg (1948-2019) in The Spectacle of Suffering (1984) and John Pratt in Punishment and Civilization (2002), found the same sequence everywhere in the West. The scaffold disappears from the square. The prison acquires clean uniforms, scheduled meals, sanitation reports, a bureaucratic vocabulary. Punishment becomes something civilized societies do without watching.
In Defense of Flogging (2011) is a probe inserted into this history. Moskos offers the convict a choice: the prison term, or two lashes per year of the sentence. He predicts nearly everyone takes the lash, and the prediction is the point. If a rational person prefers the whip to the sentence, the sentence contains more suffering than the whip. Yet the public that shudders at flogging accepts the sentence without a flicker. On Elias’s account this is no paradox and no hypocrisy in the shallow sense. It is the civilizing process operating as designed. Flogging violates the threshold of repugnance because it is visible, bodily, and immediate, blood on a stage. Ten years in a cell violates nothing because its violence arrives as duration, dispersed across paperwork and time, administered behind walls the public has arranged never to look over. The revulsion at the lash measures concealment, and concealment has been mistaken for mercy.
Moskos wrote the book, so far as the record shows, without Elias. His footnotes run to penal history and policy. That independence raises the value of the convergence. A former patrol officer, reasoning from what prisons do to the people he arrested, arrived at the thesis a Breslau sociologist derived from etiquette manuals: modern squeamishness is a fact about the audience, and tells you nothing about the quantity of violence being purchased. Where Moskos goes past Elias is the arithmetic. Elias described the curtain. Moskos priced what happens behind it. The American incarceration rate, one in a thousand for the half century before 1975, multiplied several times over during the drug war, until the United States confined a share of its population without peer among democracies. The civilizing process, in its American penal form, produced this: a society too refined to watch a whipping, warehousing two million people. Pratt and James Whitman (b. 1957), from different directions, treat American punishment as the anomaly that strains the civilized-punishment narrative. Moskos’s contribution is blunter. The narrative and the anomaly are the same fact. Concealment is the condition that lets the quantity grow. A public that had to watch what a ten-year sentence does to a man might not impose so many of them. The lash proposal is an attempt to tear the curtain, and the fury it provoked is the sound of the curtain being gripped.
The frame carries past the flogging book, because Elias’s theory has a second half that maps onto the first half of Moskos’s career.
The civilizing process depends on the monopoly of force. Pacified conduct is downstream of pacified space; the courtier learns patience because the king’s peace makes patience survivable. Where the monopoly fails, Elias’s sequence runs backward. And Baltimore’s Eastern District, as Moskos patrolled it from 1999 to 2001, was a zone where the monopoly had failed in a particular, legally manufactured way. Prohibition criminalized a large industry without extinguishing it, which meant the state refused to regulate the trade and could not suppress it. The corner filled the vacancy with the institutions of the unpacified world. Disputes settled by force. Reputation defended by violence because reputation was the only enforceable asset. A gunman on retainer, the private protector reborn, playing the role the armed retainer played before kings disarmed him. Short horizons, because foresight is a rational strategy where tomorrow is secure and a sucker’s strategy where it is not. Elias’s medieval warrior, transposed to a row-house corner, hoodie for hauberk. Cop in the Hood documents a decivilized enclave inside a civilized society, and locates the cause in law rather than in the residents: the state drew a boundary around one commerce, withdrew contract and court from it, and then sent Moskos and his squad to police the predictable result.
This is where the two halves of the frame lock together. The same society that sequesters its punishment also sequesters its unpacified zones. The violence of the Eastern District was as invisible to comfortable America as the inside of a prison, and for the same structural reason: the civilizing process concentrates what it cannot abolish among people the refined do not see. Moskos keeps producing the number that states this concentration: 96 percent of New York City’s shooting victims, he noted in April 2026, were Black or Hispanic. Elias would recognize the figuration. Pacification was never distributed evenly. The king’s peace reached the court before the countryside, the capital before the border, and its modern descendant reaches Park Slope before Brownsville. The op-ed writer’s neighborhood is the finished product of the civilizing process; the corner is its unfinished edge; and the writer’s threshold of repugnance, calibrated in the finished zone, recoils from the police force that patrols the unfinished one.
That recoil had its historical moment, and Elias supplies the least moralized account of it available. In the summer of 2020, video of a police killing put state violence on every screen in the country. The reaction was the threshold of repugnance colliding with the monopoly of force, the two components of Elias’s theory turned against each other. The body camera and the phone camera reversed the direction the curtain had moved for five centuries. Violence that had been administered behind the scenes, in the places refined people do not go, at the hours they are asleep, arrived in their hands at breakfast. Their revulsion was Elias’s civilized sensibility working correctly. What followed tested the other half of the theory. Cities pulled police back from proactive work, prosecution thinned, and the monopoly of force went slack at its unfinished edges. Murders rose nearly 30 percent nationwide in a year, the largest recorded increase, concentrated where the monopoly had always been thinnest. Elias’s students call such episodes decivilizing spurts. Moskos called it in advance and in plain words: withdraw the police and more people get shot, and the people shot will be the residents of the unpacified zones, whose deaths occur behind the same scenery that hid the policing. The refined classes saw the violence of enforcement because cameras carried it to them. The violence of the enforcement vacuum stayed off camera, arriving instead as statistics, which cross no one’s threshold of repugnance.
Here the frame illuminates the strangest feature of Moskos’s public position, the one that costs him every coalition. He wants the violence of the state made visible, and he wants the state to keep a firm monopoly of violence. He supported body cameras early, on the argument that recording would expose the officer who lies and vindicate the officer falsely accused. He wrote a book defending the lash on the argument that punishment should be seen for what it is. He built an oral history, Back from the Brink (2025), on the argument that the reassertion of the state’s monopoly in 1990s New York, precinct by precinct, subway car by subway car, saved thousands of lives, most of them Black and Hispanic. Within Elias, these are one position. The civilizing process went wrong in exactly one place: it hid the violence instead of merely reducing it, and concealment allowed the hidden quantity to grow, in the prisons, and allowed the abandoned zones to fester, on the corners. Moskos’s program, across four books, is civilization with the curtain open. Keep the monopoly, because the monopoly is what pacified space is made of. Show the public everything the monopoly does, the cell and the stop and the shooting and the cleared corner, because a public that sees what it purchases will purchase less cruelty and more protection. He trusts visibility to discipline the state the way Elias’s court disciplined the courtier: through the watching eyes.
Elias gives grounds for doubt, and the doubt belongs in any honest use of the frame. His theory offers no case of a society that reopened the curtain and liked what it saw. The direction of the process, in his evidence, runs one way, toward segregation, and reversals arrive as breakdowns rather than reforms. Hans Peter Duerr (b. 1943) spent five volumes arguing the whole civilizing narrative is a myth Europeans tell about their own refinement. Cas Wouters (b. 1943), Elias’s most faithful student, documented informalization, the twentieth-century loosening of manners, but loosened manners are a long way from a public willing to watch its punishments. The 2020 test cuts against Moskos here. The public saw one category of state violence and demanded less of the monopoly, and the result was more violence, unseen. Visibility disciplined the state and undefended the corner in the same motion. Moskos would answer that the public saw selectively, the enforcement and never the vacuum, and that his whole output is an attempt to put the vacuum on stage too, the shot teenagers, the uncleared murders, the neighborhoods that call 911 and get a forty-minute wait. The answer is coherent. Whether any audience can be made to watch both stages at once, Elias’s five centuries of evidence leave open, and lean against.
One more Eliasian reading suggests itself, of the man rather than the work. Elias insisted that thresholds of shame are acquired, class-marked, and mistaken by their bearers for human nature. The academic profession has such thresholds. Its members do not carry guns, do not put hands on strangers, do not, as a rule, spend a year taking orders from sergeants. Moskos crossed that threshold in 1999 and has spent his career reporting from the other side of it, telling his own class that its distaste for the people who do the state’s coercion is a fact about its refinement and no guide to policy. His father crossed the same line into the mess halls of another coercive institution. Both men made careers of a single Eliasian act: going behind the scenes of social life, where their society keeps its violence, and writing down what the scenery conceals.
The civilizing process, Elias wrote near the end of the book that 1939 buried, is unfinished. He meant that self-restraint remained brittle and the monopoly of force incomplete, and the decade that followed proved him right on a scale he did not live to describe until The Germans (1989), his late study of his own country’s decivilization. Moskos works the same unfinished ground at street level. The corner where the monopoly never arrived. The prison where the segregation succeeded too well. The screen that broke the segregation for one category of violence and left the other in the dark. His answer, keep the peace and open the curtain, asks his society to do something Elias never observed one doing. That is the measure of the program’s ambition, and of its odds.
