Marie Gottschalk > Quotes

“If one looks back at the history of penal policy and reform, it is striking what an uncritical stance earlier women reformers took toward the state. Periodically, they have played central roles in defining violence as a threat to the social order and uncritically pushing for more enhanced policing powers. Feminist groups…became champions of state intervention to address problems like rape and domestic violence. Nearly every state enacted legislation designed to make it easier to convict and punish people accused of sexual assault or domestic violence.”
― Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

“Many of the pathologies that run through the carceral state also run through American politics today. They include the unwarranted reverence for nonpartisanship at all costs, the uncritical acceptance of neoliberalism in all aspects of public policy, the stranglehold that economic and financial interests exert on politics and policy-making, the growing political and economic disenfranchisement of wide swaths of the population, and the gross limitations of oppositional strategies formed primarily around identity-based politics.”
― Marie Gottschalk

“The U.S. penal system has a strong tendency to “level down”. The much-heralded “liberal” features of American political culture ironically have helped to render the U.S. penal system harsher, more degrading, and less forgiving as it extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.”
― Marie Gottschalk

“In the 1920s [after centuries of slavery and decades of segregation], fewer than one in three prisoners were black. By the late 1980s [after decades of welfare], for the first time in US history the majority of prisoners were black.”
― Marie Gottschalk