Caught

November 1, 2014
Of "punitive sentiments and punitive policies"-a searching study of the explosion of American prisons, seemingly one of the nation's only growth industry.The notion of the "carceral state" has been current for half a century, thanks in good part to Michel Foucault, but only recently have the statistics caught up to the theory. Gottschalk (Political Science/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, 2006, etc.) describes a kind of American gulag that has "sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment and has been extending its reach far beyond the prison gate." On one hand are three-strikes laws and politicians enriching themselves at the trough of private prisons; on the other hand are powerful corrections-workers unions that resist reforms. All demand to be fed, and they are fed with prisoners in a rigged system that no one wants to fix. Gottschalk's densely documented study-nearly a third of the book is notes and sources-is academic but accessible, and it has an urgency to it. As she observes, much reformist political energy has gone into the three Rs of "recidivism, reentry, and justice reinvestment" and entirely too little into investigating the social causes of crime, among them a vast racial imbalance brought on by such things as "the push to build up human capital rather than address the disappearance of good jobs." Meanwhile, the carceral state grows at immense cost, both social and financial, unchecked legislatively or even at the level of the Supreme Court, which, Gottschalk argues, seems interested only in capital-level crimes while failing to make any contributions to determining "proportionality" in the punishment of crime. Even as the carceral state grows, Gottschalk concludes, crime persists-less so in affluent communities, but ragingly in minority areas, A needed cry for justice, though perhaps unlikely to be heeded in this noisy second Gilded Age.

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