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 鈥渄eaths of despair鈥� 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鈥攁lthough 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.
Awards and Recognition
- Finalist for the Z贸calo Public Square Book Prize
- Winner of the Best Book Award, Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center
"Marie Gottschalk situates Trump's rise behind the backdrop of US Empire, militarized police and Capital's stranglehold on politics—depicting a nation not plagued by one man, but sick to the core."鈥擟hris Hedges, Chris Hedges Report
"Gottschalk turns her attention to the crimes that never end up penalized, from the corporate malfeasance behind the 2008 financial crisis to the engineered opioid epidemic to the slow-motion violence of state neglect. For Gottschalk, mass incarceration and the mass decriminalization of corporate and white-collar crime are not separate stories but two facets of the same phenomenon of ultramagnified inequality."鈥擬eagan Day, Jacobin
"[Gottschalk] draws an intimate connection between violent street crime and the militarization of the state, as well as to an increasingly unequal justice system that protects 'crime in the suites.' Her aim in this wide-ranging volume is to make the case that the United States must think about 'crime, violence, punishment, power, wealth, and inequality' as a unit."鈥擩essica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs
"[Gottschalk] expands the definition of violence to include corporate, state, and institutional violence. The result, she says, is systemic violence, high incarceration rates, and a fragile democracy."鈥擬ichael Beschloss, Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards Chair
"By meticulously connecting the dots between seemingly disparate issues—from financialization to forever wars, from mass incarceration to corporate impunity—[Gottschalk] provides a compelling framework for understanding the systemic roots of violence and offers a visionary roadmap for a more equitable and just society. Her work challenges not only policymakers and legal professionals but also the public to confront uncomfortable truths about power, privilege, and the true cost of unaccountability in contemporary America."鈥擜mara Maple, Scandal Watch
"A key resource for anyone curious about how to implement reforms to hold the powerful accountable as well as readers seeking to better understand the chronically uneven and unjust approach to law enforcement in the U.S."鈥擱ick Claypool, Public Citizen News
"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."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“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
