EBOOK
About
How concentrated economic and political power in America protects elites and fosters violence of all kinds
The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America. In Crime and No Punishment, Marie Gottschalk argues that these developments have undermined the legitimacy of American political and economic institutions.
Gottschalk analyzes how the concentration of economic, political, and military power has siphoned off vital resources, preying on the most vulnerable communities and normalizing violence and death. It has kept America from attacking the root causes of violent street crime and curtailing "deaths of despair" from suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and chronic diseases. The United States continues to incarcerate more of its people than nearly every other country even as it decriminalizes or turns a blind eye to elite-level corporate crime. Public and scholarly attention, however, remains fixated on violent street crime-although corporate and white-collar crime and state and economic violence directly and indirectly hurt far more people in the United States. Gottschalk contends that the US failure to protect its people from these harms has increased the fragility of democracy in America. Marie Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the prize-winning Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton) and other books. "Marie Gottschalk has given us exactly the book we need for making sense of and acting in this historical moment. In Crime and No Punishment she has done no less than demonstrate the class contradiction at the core of criminal justice policy through a rich account of the emergence and genesis of neoliberalism in economic and social policy over the last half-century or more. This book is an extraordinary accomplishment."-Adolph Reed, Mount Holyoke College
"One of America's foremost scholars of political science and criminology, Marie Gottschalk has written a hugely important analysis of the scale and contours of punishment and crime in the United States. Crime and No Punishment brilliantly contrasts corporate, state, and carceral spheres of criminality, punishment, and violence in twenty-first-century America." -Desmond King, University of Oxford
"Gottschalk illustrates the 'deaths of despair' that capture our national condition and its effects on vulnerable groups, including rural as well as urban America. Gottschalk's scholarship shapes our understanding of the dangerous world in which we live and contributes greatly to our collective potential."-John L. Hagan, Northwestern University "Finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize" "A distinguished political scientist condemns the 'social murder' of America's working people committed by corporations, the wealthy, and the state. . . . A clearsighted analysis of the systemic class war that the 1 percent is waging on the rest-and without penalty."
The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America. In Crime and No Punishment, Marie Gottschalk argues that these developments have undermined the legitimacy of American political and economic institutions.
Gottschalk analyzes how the concentration of economic, political, and military power has siphoned off vital resources, preying on the most vulnerable communities and normalizing violence and death. It has kept America from attacking the root causes of violent street crime and curtailing "deaths of despair" from suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and chronic diseases. The United States continues to incarcerate more of its people than nearly every other country even as it decriminalizes or turns a blind eye to elite-level corporate crime. Public and scholarly attention, however, remains fixated on violent street crime-although corporate and white-collar crime and state and economic violence directly and indirectly hurt far more people in the United States. Gottschalk contends that the US failure to protect its people from these harms has increased the fragility of democracy in America. Marie Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the prize-winning Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton) and other books. "Marie Gottschalk has given us exactly the book we need for making sense of and acting in this historical moment. In Crime and No Punishment she has done no less than demonstrate the class contradiction at the core of criminal justice policy through a rich account of the emergence and genesis of neoliberalism in economic and social policy over the last half-century or more. This book is an extraordinary accomplishment."-Adolph Reed, Mount Holyoke College
"One of America's foremost scholars of political science and criminology, Marie Gottschalk has written a hugely important analysis of the scale and contours of punishment and crime in the United States. Crime and No Punishment brilliantly contrasts corporate, state, and carceral spheres of criminality, punishment, and violence in twenty-first-century America." -Desmond King, University of Oxford
"Gottschalk illustrates the 'deaths of despair' that capture our national condition and its effects on vulnerable groups, including rural as well as urban America. Gottschalk's scholarship shapes our understanding of the dangerous world in which we live and contributes greatly to our collective potential."-John L. Hagan, Northwestern University "Finalist for the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize" "A distinguished political scientist condemns the 'social murder' of America's working people committed by corporations, the wealthy, and the state. . . . A clearsighted analysis of the systemic class war that the 1 percent is waging on the rest-and without penalty."