Synopses & Reviews
"This is the most comprehensive, synthetic, and compelling account of what is driving penal trends in America today. For contemporary scholars and activists,
Caught is certain to become a common starting point for future debates about what direction policy reform and social activism should take."
--Jonathan Simon, author of Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear"[A]cademic but accessible, and it has an urgency to it. . . . A needed cry for justice."--Kirkus Reviews
"This is a brilliantly framed, intellectually courageous analysis of a pivotal and problematic period in American criminal justice history. Gottschalk offers unique and penetrating insights into the complex forces that led to the creation of our nation's massive carceral state. Her research is meticulous, the scope of her vision is sweeping, and her criticism is unflinching. Absolutely essential reading for understanding this profound transformation of American society."--Craig W. Haney, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Gottschalk's book is a tour de force. Caught constitutes a searing critique of current incarceration policies and prevailing approaches to prison reform. It is brilliantly argued, breathtakingly capacious in its informational reach, and intellectually bold. A stunning achievement."--Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Cornell University
"In this pathbreaking and meticulous book, Gottschalk traces the rapid development of highly targeted mass imprisonment since the early 1970s. Drawing links between the prison buildup and a range of policies that have increased state control and surveillance beyond the prison, Caught sheds new light on the relationship between criminal justice and the ideological shape, material conditions, and institutional structure of the broader political economy."--Nicola Lacey, London School of Economics
"Caught makes clear that we have totally underestimated just how devastating an impact today's massive carceral state has had on our nation, and shines much-needed light on why it has been so immune to attempts at reform. Most importantly, this book offers vital new perspective on what it actually will take to unmake this criminal justice crisis."--Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan
Review
"Gottschalk provides a systematic, surprising, and scathing critique of the prison state. . . . Caught may well be the best book on this subject to appear in decades."--Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post
Review
"Gottschalk is particularly convincing about the follow-on effects of incarceration on the vulnerable neighborhoods that contribute most to the prison population."--Jakub Wrzewniewski, Pacific Standard
Review
"An encyclopedic synthesis of recent scholarly work and journalism on criminal justice, Caught spans a wide range of topics but has a simple refrain: Beware of bipartisan reformers bearing gifts. Politicians pretend that hard problems are easy and make easy problems hard. Gottschalk, to her credit, is no politician."--Sara Mayeux, Chronicle Review
Review
"Everyone . . . should read this book."--Angelia Wilson, Times Higher Education
Review
"Gottschalk has done a public service. She has tried to untangle a fiendishly complex subject, helping to liberate her readers from the intellectual prison of conventional wisdom in the process."--Gary Silverman, Financial Times
Review
"Marie Gottschalk's commanding and disturbing Caught is our best guide to the political decisions and public policies that have created the carceral state and our present immobility on the issue of crime and its punishment. . . . Caught is that relatively rare academic book that hopes to move both public debate and policy."--Michael Meranze, Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
"[D]evastatingly persuasive. . . . Caught proves not only an authoritative companion to the criminal justice system crises you know, but also a thorough compendium of the crises you've never even considered."--Stephen Lurie, Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
"[A] powerful book."--Choice
Review
"Gottschalk convincingly shows that the American penal system has come to embody a very un-American idea: that there are lives that are not worth caring about and people beyond reforming."--The Christian Century
Review
"Gottschalk's analysis offers a strong counternarrative to existing quick-fix solutions to mass incarceration."--James Kilgore, Truthout
Review
"Caught is an impressive accomplishment."--Bob Lane, Metapsychology
Synopsis
A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in America
The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country's vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.
In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism.
In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.
Synopsis
The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country's vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.
In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism.
In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.
Synopsis
"Gottschalk's book is a tour de force.
Caught constitutes a searing critique of current incarceration policies and prevailing approaches to prison reform. It is brilliantly argued, breathtakingly capacious in its informational reach, and intellectually bold. A stunning achievement."
--Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Cornell University"This is the most comprehensive, synthetic, and compelling account of what is driving penal trends in America today. For contemporary scholars and activists, Caught is certain to become a common starting point for future debates about what direction policy reform and social activism should take."--Jonathan Simon, author of Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear
About the Author
Marie Gottschalk is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. A former editor and journalist, she was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration.
Table of Contents
List of Figures xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Chapter 1 Introduction
The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics 1
Part I The Political Economy of Penal Reform 23
Chapter 2 Show Me the Money, The Great Recession and the Great Confinement 25
Chapter 3 Squaring the Political Circle, The New Political Economy of the Carceral State 48
Chapter 4 What Second Chance?, Reentry and Penal Reform 79
Chapter 5 Caught Again, Justice Reinvestment and Recidivism 98
Part II The Politics of Race and Penal Reform 117
Chapter 6 Is Mass Incarceration the "New Jim Crow"? Racial Disparities and the Carceral State 119
Chapter 7 What's Race Got to Do with It?, Bolstering and Challenging the Carceral State 139
Part III The Metastasizing Carceral State 163
Chapter 8 Split Verdict, The Non, Non, Nons and the "Worst of the Worst" 165
Chapter 9 The New Untouchables, The War on Sex Offenders 196
Chapter 10 Catch and Keep, The Criminalization of Immigrants 215
Chapter 11 The Prison beyond the Prison, The Carceral State and Growing Political and Economic Inequalities in the United States 241
Chapter 12 Bring It On, The Future of Penal Reform, the Carceral State, and American Politics 258
Acknowledgments 283
Notes 285
Select Bibliography 411
Index 439