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Seeking to shed light on how we might end mass incarceration, The Price of Freedom compares the histories and goals of the American and German justice systems. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with incarcerated young men in the United States and Germany, Michaela Soyer argues that the apparent relative lenience of the German criminal justice system is actually founded on the violent enforcement of cultural homogeneity at the hands of the German welfare state. Demonstrating how both societies have constructed a racialized underclass of outsiders over time, this book emphasizes that criminal justice reformers in the United States need to move beyond European models in order to build a truly just, diverse society.

Michaela Soyer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. She is author of A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America and Lost Childhoods: Poverty, Trauma, and Violent Crime in the Post-Welfare Era.

"In this provocative and deeply humane new book, sociologist Michaela Soyer dissects the stark differences in punishment systems between the United States and Germany through the experiences of incarcerated young men. The Price of Freedom deftly shows the relation between punishment, the welfare state, and diversity—and the difficult trade-offs ahead."—François Bonnet, author of The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare
 
"In both Germany and the United States, racialized young men are far more likely to be imprisoned than their white peers—yet the societal responses to this fact have been profoundly different. Drawing on sensitive interviews and nuanced comparative ethnography, Soyer shows how these young men understand their place in their respective societies, the forces that led to their incarceration, and where they might go in the future. She thus reveals the hidden goals, understandings, and contradictions that shape both systems. The Price of Freedom sheds new light on the problem of mass incarceration while pointing to what the German and American justice systems might learn from each other."—Philip Kasinitz, coeditor of Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United States
 
"This innovative book breaks through the dulling sense of familiarity that focusing on only one society so easily engenders. By comparing young men's experiences with incarceration in Germany and the United States, Soyer invites us to view both criminal justice systems with fresh eyes and reveals the distinct ways in which marginalization and incarceration interact. American and German scholars alike have much to learn from Soyer's ambitious research."—Jan Doering, author of Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods
 
"In The Price of Freedom, Soyer provides a unique comparative analysis of incarceration in the United States and Germany. Her rich, in-depth qualitative analysis allows her to develop nuanced insights into processes of racial and ethnic marginalization and criminalization in the two countries and to develop explanations for what each country can learn from the other in terms of their treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. Soyer's book is an important read for social scientists and policymakers concerned with social inequality and incarceration."—Danielle Raudenbush, author of Health Care Off the Books: Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America
 
"The Price of Freedom offers a much-needed comparative study of incarceration in two very different contexts, contrasting the quintessential mass incarceration nation of the United States with the more lenient German penal context. Through comparative ethnography and interviews, Soyer documents how such different contexts both produce prisons filled with the socially marginalized, and she elegantly links the conditions that bring marginalized men into prison to culturally conditioned explanations for their pathways to crime and imprisonment. This rare comparative work allows readers to see the much-studied but extreme US context through a new lens while offering lessons on how men interpret their histories through their cultural context. This book has much to offer prison scholars as well as those more generally interested in poverty, social marginalization, and comparative social theory."—Sara Wakefield, coauthor of Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality