The Long Reach of the Carceral State: The Politics of Crime, Mass Imprisonment, and Penal Reform in the United States and Abroad
Marie Gottschalk,
Corresponding Author
Marie Gottschalk
Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania
Marie Gottschalk is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. She can be reached at [email protected]. Special thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the extremely helpful and insightful suggestions for revising this essay.Search for more papers by this authorMarie Gottschalk,
Corresponding Author
Marie Gottschalk
Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania
Marie Gottschalk is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. She can be reached at [email protected]. Special thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the extremely helpful and insightful suggestions for revising this essay.Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
This essay reviews five books as they relate to the causes and political consequences of mass imprisonment in the United States and the comparative politics of penal policy: Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007); Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen's Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (2006); Jonathan Simon's Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007); Michael Tonry, ed., Crime, Punishment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective (2007); and Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America (2006).
The essay first examines the enormous and growing political repercussions of having a vast penal system embedded in a democratic polity, including the political and electoral consequences of felon disenfranchisement; increasing political, social, and economic inequality for people marked by the penal system; and the phenomenon of “governing through crime.” It also analyzes emerging strategies of resistance to US penal policies and mass incarceration, why some countries are more vulnerable to hard-line penal policies than others, and what it will take to reverse the US prison boom.
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