Marie Gottschalk

Marie Gottschalk is an American political scientist and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, known for her work on mass incarceration in the United States. Gottschalk is the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (2016) and Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America (2025). Her research investigates the origins of the carceral state in the United States, the critiques of the scope and size of the carceral network, and the intersections of the carceral state with race and economic inequality.

Career

In the 1980s she spent two years in China as a university lecturer and published on international relationships between China and the United States under the Bush administration. By 1992, after having worked as a journalist, she was associate editor of World Policy Journal (WPJ). In a 1992 WPJ article she echoed concerns expressed by Washington Post journalist, Colman McCarthy that the American media, which were under "unprecedented restrictions" during the Gulf War, was—like the "American consumer, corporation and Congress"—being profoundly re-shaped by the Bush administration. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, she also worked as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and as a Fulbright Program Distinguished Lecturer in Japan. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She was featured among the experts interviewed in the Academy Award-nominated 2016 documentary 13th. Gottschalk traced the nationalization and politicization of law and order, the relationship between power and punishment, the origins and construction of the carceral state in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s, prison activism and prison rights, public policies in the penal system, and capital punishment. She called for more research on the causes and consequences of the "retributive turn" in American penal policies. She described the carceral turn in academic research from the late 1990s onwards, with disciplines, such as criminology, sociology, law, and political science, investigating "politics and the origins of the carceral state." By the 2000s, new research expanded the scope of the literature on the carceral state to include its "political consequences" and to analyse its implications. The sheer size of the carceral state was beginning to "transform fundamental democratic institutions." According to Gottschalk, democratic "free and fair elections" and "accurate and representative census" were no longer assured. The literature on American politics and the carceral state which has expanded far beyond criminal justice, included "voter turnout", the "vanishing voter," the role of neoliberalism in the economic policies of the 1990s, and the rise of the national Republican Party. She wrote that this new "scholarship on the carceral state" also raises concerns regarding "power and resistance for marginalized and stigmatized groups." It was re-published with the title, Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, by Princeton University Press in 2016. She examined the impact of the Great Recession—the 2008 financial crisis— on the "Great Confinement".

Reviews and mentions

Gottschalk is widely cited in research related to the carceral state. Peter K. Enns, who is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (2016) described Gottschalk's 2006 The Prison and the Gallows, as "pathbreaking." Enns agrees with Gottschalk's conclusion that policymakers overestimate the public's opinion on crime as more punitive than it is. Its title refers to the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Gottschalk's Caught was cited by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissenting opinion in Utah v. Strieff (2016).