Caught : the prison state and the lockdown of American politics /

Gottschalk (Univ. of Pennsylvania) explores the consequences of American hyper-incarceration over the past 40 years: the army of unemployed and unemployable former offenders, the untold hardships visited upon their children and families, and the implications this policy has for democracy, citizenship, and the social contract. Despite crime being down to lows not experienced since the 1960s, incarceration rates remain at near record highs, locked in place by constitutional amendments and narrow interest groups. As with so many other social problems, the author maintains, American officials lack the ability and will to respond meaningfully, despite growing public support for change. Certainly, draconian policies locked into state constitutions make it difficult to change. And many seemingly impressive reforms lack bite. Gottschalk shows that proposals to develop race-neutral sentences and reintegration programs for released offenders are at best symbolic responses whose primary effects may be to more deeply obscure the problems. The title and subtitle of this powerful book--Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics--accurately describe the predicament. Before the prison state can be challenged, the lockdown of American politics must be broken. The US is caught in a powerful trap of its own design. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Malcolm M. Feeley, University of California, Berkeley

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 studynearly a third of the book is notes and sourcesis 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 persistsless 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.