This thesis argues that the United States police is an inherently U.S. institution that was grown out of a culture of policing that came to exist with the creation of the social order in Puritan New England. It traces this culture of policing and its constant reinvention throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to illustrate the ways in which policing shifts as the potential threats to the social order shift while maintaining the same premise: those condemned to social death must be controlled for the social order to remain. It focuses on New England, specifically using Middletown Connecticut as a case study throughout, to show the pervasive nature of this culture and institution, and its role at the center of the social order.