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

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.

Reviews

"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 "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 "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 "Everyone ... should read this book."--Angelia Wilson, Times Higher Education "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 "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 "[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 "[A] powerful book."--Choice "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 "Gottschalk's analysis offers a strong counternarrative to existing quick-fix solutions to mass incarceration."--James Kilgore, Truthout "Caught is an impressive accomplishment."--Bob Lane, Metapsychology "Caught is hard-hitting book on all that is wrong with the American carceral state. Importantly, it also shows why previous reform efforts have failed."--Eleanor Healy-Birt, Interlib "Gottschalk's study is a broad assessment of the state of imprisonment today, offering a thorough and pointed critique of the notion that fiscal pressures on state budgets will necessarily usher in the beginning of the end of the carceral era."--Amy E. Lerman, University of California, Berkeley and Vesla M. weaver, Yale University "Admirably bold... [S]weeping and magisterial."--Perspectives on Politics "[T]he best single-volume overview of the ongoing crisis in American criminal justice."--Chase Madar, American Conservative