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Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics
A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in America
The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country's vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.
In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism.
In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.
The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country's vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge.
In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism.
In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published November 23, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
February 6, 2024
There's some good and interesting information in here, but it took a surprising sharp turn down Problematic Lane in Chapter 6 that I will never get over
October 8, 2015
From the acknowledgments section: "Caught uses the problem of the carceral state as a lens to bring into acute focus the broader pathologies that vex American politics today."
An excellent read--comprehensive, sharp, useful, and actionable. Highly recommended!!!
An excellent read--comprehensive, sharp, useful, and actionable. Highly recommended!!!
April 17, 2018
I feel like this book occupied an unfortunate intersection of advocacy and citation. It should have either been less opinionated or less boring. I was disturbed when a few of the endnotes cited sources that didn't seem... entirely credible on the face of it.
That being said, it brings light to a crucially important problem - or problems. Not only does it cover the current (or 2014) state of mass incarceration, it assesses the politics that make it so. And with thousands of endnotes and an extensive biography, there are plenty of places to go from here.
That being said, it brings light to a crucially important problem - or problems. Not only does it cover the current (or 2014) state of mass incarceration, it assesses the politics that make it so. And with thousands of endnotes and an extensive biography, there are plenty of places to go from here.
August 2, 2016
Gottschalk's "Caught" is the most important book I've read in the last ten years. Brilliant, terrifying, and invigorating.
July 3, 2017
Essential.
July 31, 2020
Violent crime rates have been dropping in the US since the 1990s, but our prisons are overcrowded. Gottschalk explores the reasons for this overcrowding and what we can do as a society to start addressing these issues.
I picked this book up after it was included on this list . It is more scholarly than many books I have read and can be dry at times, but I found it to be an informative and compelling read. It is a rage-inducing read when you look at the injustices of our "justice" system. The book also shines light on the myths and lies that we have all been told about prison and prisoners. It shows how political maneuvering by both parties have made things worse. It is not an easy read and provides no easy answers, but it is important and timely.
I picked this book up after it was included on this list . It is more scholarly than many books I have read and can be dry at times, but I found it to be an informative and compelling read. It is a rage-inducing read when you look at the injustices of our "justice" system. The book also shines light on the myths and lies that we have all been told about prison and prisoners. It shows how political maneuvering by both parties have made things worse. It is not an easy read and provides no easy answers, but it is important and timely.
July 15, 2020
Wow. Things I learned:
Chapter 1 - prison reformers have generally fallen into one of two categories - the prison system is racist or it is too costly - but the full reason is more complex and indicts free market capitalism as a force that exploits the most vulnerable aspects of our society;
Chapter 2: as the Great Recession increased unemployment and the War on Drugs increased arrests, many prisons privatized to handle the influx and slash budgets;
Chapter 3: private prisons are largely unregulated, have poorer outcomes for prisoners, and have a vested interest in prisoners remaining exactly where they are;
Chapter 4: parole reform has been ineffective because it focuses on "fixing" the prisoner rather than reforming society to provide meaningful employment opportunities for the poor, for former felons, and for black men generally;
Chapter 5: bipartisan reforms are often watered down and ineffective because they seek to reform the individual rather than the dysfunctional system, and policies based on recidivism may have misleading results due to how someone measures recidivism (most re-arrests are for minor parole infractions rather than new, serious crimes);
Chapter 6: while racial disparities in sentencing and arrests exist, the U.S. prison system is still brutal and excessive even when taking race out of the picture;
Chapter 7: mass incarceration has too many contributing factors to name one villain; even civil rights groups have been largely silent, and some black politicians have advocated for the war on drugs and more arrests in their communities;
Chapter 8: laws that try to punish the "worst of the worst" and save non-violent offenders haven't worked, as the lines are too blurry - the bottom line is that our whole system is far more punitive than any other developed country;
Chapter 9: sex offender laws cast too wide a net and punish too strongly (this was a hard chapter for me, and the book didn't offer solutions for what to do with the minority of very serious repeat sex offenders);
Chapter 10: the criminalization of immigration policy - increasing in past decades and brought to a climax under President Obama - has resulted in expanded detention facilities for immigrants and unjust arrests for many who commit even minor crimes;
Chapter 11: a prisoner's punishment goes beyond his / her sentence and into "civil death," as on release they lose key privileges of citizenship, such as voting, housing, work, and even food stamps;
Chapter 12: to dismantle the carceral state and truly attack crime, we need sentencing reform, investment in the community, and buy-in from prosecutors, judges, cops, and voters.
Chapter 1 - prison reformers have generally fallen into one of two categories - the prison system is racist or it is too costly - but the full reason is more complex and indicts free market capitalism as a force that exploits the most vulnerable aspects of our society;
Chapter 2: as the Great Recession increased unemployment and the War on Drugs increased arrests, many prisons privatized to handle the influx and slash budgets;
Chapter 3: private prisons are largely unregulated, have poorer outcomes for prisoners, and have a vested interest in prisoners remaining exactly where they are;
Chapter 4: parole reform has been ineffective because it focuses on "fixing" the prisoner rather than reforming society to provide meaningful employment opportunities for the poor, for former felons, and for black men generally;
Chapter 5: bipartisan reforms are often watered down and ineffective because they seek to reform the individual rather than the dysfunctional system, and policies based on recidivism may have misleading results due to how someone measures recidivism (most re-arrests are for minor parole infractions rather than new, serious crimes);
Chapter 6: while racial disparities in sentencing and arrests exist, the U.S. prison system is still brutal and excessive even when taking race out of the picture;
Chapter 7: mass incarceration has too many contributing factors to name one villain; even civil rights groups have been largely silent, and some black politicians have advocated for the war on drugs and more arrests in their communities;
Chapter 8: laws that try to punish the "worst of the worst" and save non-violent offenders haven't worked, as the lines are too blurry - the bottom line is that our whole system is far more punitive than any other developed country;
Chapter 9: sex offender laws cast too wide a net and punish too strongly (this was a hard chapter for me, and the book didn't offer solutions for what to do with the minority of very serious repeat sex offenders);
Chapter 10: the criminalization of immigration policy - increasing in past decades and brought to a climax under President Obama - has resulted in expanded detention facilities for immigrants and unjust arrests for many who commit even minor crimes;
Chapter 11: a prisoner's punishment goes beyond his / her sentence and into "civil death," as on release they lose key privileges of citizenship, such as voting, housing, work, and even food stamps;
Chapter 12: to dismantle the carceral state and truly attack crime, we need sentencing reform, investment in the community, and buy-in from prosecutors, judges, cops, and voters.
September 23, 2015
This is a very difficult book to read. First, it is dense, and the subject is extremely complex. Second, it is very depressing, particularly if you have a family member caught by the the carceral state. The way the author describes the problem it is pretty much hopeless. The politics are tricky (support for the carceral state is largely bipartisan) and the carceral state is extremely resilient (as the war on drugs wanes, the war on immigrants and sex offenders takes off). At times I was considering skimming some of the material, but each time I realized that this book is too important to skim. My friend's brother spent 17 years in prison. When I asked him about it, he said, "Once the State gets its teeth in your butt, it will not let go." That pretty well sums up the book, but without all the statistics and history of how it got that way.
I did get a great quote from the book:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair
I did get a great quote from the book:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair
April 18, 2015
The carceral state is a fact of life in the US. More prisoners, longer sentences, more prisons, longer paroles, and lack of re-entry of prisoners into society describes are national dilemma. We can't afford it, and the vested interests that it has created distort our democracy, as private prisons set up their K street offices.
We have some hope that with the re-thinking of drug laws that the situation may get better. But, the author feels that as drug prison time falls, the carceral state will ramp of the pursuit of other client prisoners. The War on Sex offenders, and the War on illegal immigrants have kept and will keep the prisons full.
This expose on the Prison-Industrial society is disturbing and comprehensive. Everything for the privileged and private activity of U.S. Prosecutors to the Disenfranchisement of former prisons from civic duties is discussed.
Some remedies are discussed, but I personally doubt we have the political will to sensibly enact them. Read this book and see what you think1
We have some hope that with the re-thinking of drug laws that the situation may get better. But, the author feels that as drug prison time falls, the carceral state will ramp of the pursuit of other client prisoners. The War on Sex offenders, and the War on illegal immigrants have kept and will keep the prisons full.
This expose on the Prison-Industrial society is disturbing and comprehensive. Everything for the privileged and private activity of U.S. Prosecutors to the Disenfranchisement of former prisons from civic duties is discussed.
Some remedies are discussed, but I personally doubt we have the political will to sensibly enact them. Read this book and see what you think1
April 29, 2017
Comprehensive look at criminal justice system and the limits of current reform efforts. Depressing, in many respects. I don't share the author's politics but her facts are indisputable.
January 2, 2023
I've been meaning to read this for a while, as it's one of the big comprehensive treatments of mass incarceration of recent years. As such, it's a little hard to "review" - it's an incredibly valuable overview of a lot of things, and also will be mostly unsurprising for folks following the issues (though very useful as a reference).
Chapter 11, on "the prison beyond the prison," is likely to be the most valuable for folks with some background knowledge. The ways in which carceral systems are used to govern people outside of formal prison walls is both important from a broad policy standpoint for understanding the way in which states, particularly the US, "govern through crime" (to steal Simon's phrase) and worth understanding in their practical details (e.g., the extent to which people are threatened by technical parole violations - an issue that Gottschalk also takes up in her discussion of recidivism).
I felt like some of her policy analysis and activist advice was unfocused. She's concerned with pushing against the view that solving racial disparities in the prison system should be the main focus. I'm sympathetic to this view - prisons clearly wouldn't be all better if the percentages of Black and white people incarcerated perfectly matched the demographics of the broader society, after all. But to move from there to say that we should be focused on reducing overall incarceration and that racism is kind of a red herring (which she seems to be saying) seems like an underdeveloped understanding of what racism is and how it works. In her concluding chapter, she also recommends focusing away from "root causes" approaches to *crime* as too long-termist for folks interested in working on mass incarceration. And that's fair, both because we might want to make some progress before the final collapse of capitalism in the misty future, and since she persuasively argues that incarceration rates are only loosely connected to crime rates in the first place. But while she acknowledges that "what works" isn't a winning political strategy, she talks only in the most superficial ways about how structural socio-economic-political factors explain why people in power are unlikely to move us off our current course.
Chapter 11, on "the prison beyond the prison," is likely to be the most valuable for folks with some background knowledge. The ways in which carceral systems are used to govern people outside of formal prison walls is both important from a broad policy standpoint for understanding the way in which states, particularly the US, "govern through crime" (to steal Simon's phrase) and worth understanding in their practical details (e.g., the extent to which people are threatened by technical parole violations - an issue that Gottschalk also takes up in her discussion of recidivism).
I felt like some of her policy analysis and activist advice was unfocused. She's concerned with pushing against the view that solving racial disparities in the prison system should be the main focus. I'm sympathetic to this view - prisons clearly wouldn't be all better if the percentages of Black and white people incarcerated perfectly matched the demographics of the broader society, after all. But to move from there to say that we should be focused on reducing overall incarceration and that racism is kind of a red herring (which she seems to be saying) seems like an underdeveloped understanding of what racism is and how it works. In her concluding chapter, she also recommends focusing away from "root causes" approaches to *crime* as too long-termist for folks interested in working on mass incarceration. And that's fair, both because we might want to make some progress before the final collapse of capitalism in the misty future, and since she persuasively argues that incarceration rates are only loosely connected to crime rates in the first place. But while she acknowledges that "what works" isn't a winning political strategy, she talks only in the most superficial ways about how structural socio-economic-political factors explain why people in power are unlikely to move us off our current course.
November 2, 2023
Gottschalk does her work in this weighty discussion of not only the current carceral state of affairs, but also how/why/when we got here AND why so many people have mistaken the reasons for the political ambivalence on the issue. Gottschalk lays the bare how controlling the lives of the "underclass of undesirables" has always been at the heart of the prison system, and that attempts to prioritize race, racism, or White prejudice as the root of the problem makes it impossible to fix. Acknowledging the overrepresentation of Black America as victims in the entirety of the carceral system (prison, jail, mental institutions, policing, surveillance, etc.) is factual, Gottschalk shows how ones place in the capitalist hierarchy of the USofA labels you more or less likely to be captured by the carceral agents, regardless of your race. If this sounds like liberal claptrap (akin to "slavery is in the past, move on!", "we are post-racial now") then you are mistaken and likely to be surprised at what you read. Like most problems in the USofA, the issue at the heart of things is class, as in which one you are in, not if you have any. Gottschalk goes further in her research than simply lining up statistics, and her conclusions about how we shrink the carceral system are extremely well-reasoned but also hard reading, as they are going to be tough to implement. A fantastic book that upends a lot of accepted and parroted ideas about the history of the carceral system and the politics that built it.
May 8, 2024
this is mostly good and i think there's a lot of important stuff in here but i think gottschalk hamstrings herself a lot in chapter six, which feels constructed as a critical response to the new jim crow but fails to accurately or persuasively argue against it in any real way, instead cherry-picking specificities in the criminal justice system that don’t exhibit racial disparities to try to prove that the discussion has been too focused on racial disparities. sure, there are other factors bearing on mass incarceration, but why make that point by attempting to dismiss one of the most important books about mass incarceration this century?
there are a lot of little things like this - questionable citations, slightly incorrect facts, pointedly-chosen statistics - that, while i'm obviously sympathetic to the argument of this book, made me sort of question her research methods a bit. however, overall, gottschalk raises so many crucial and little-discussed points in this book that i'm glad i read it. i especially enjoyed chapter 8 (about lwop) and chapter 10 (about immigration detention).
there are a lot of little things like this - questionable citations, slightly incorrect facts, pointedly-chosen statistics - that, while i'm obviously sympathetic to the argument of this book, made me sort of question her research methods a bit. however, overall, gottschalk raises so many crucial and little-discussed points in this book that i'm glad i read it. i especially enjoyed chapter 8 (about lwop) and chapter 10 (about immigration detention).
July 2, 2022
3.75- definitely one of the better books on the carceral system and it's connections to economics and politics. Definitely a more difficult and more dry read- heavy on studies and empirical numbers. A major highlight of the book include Gottshalk's critique of The New Jim Crow and the idea that the primary problem with the carceral system is racial (of course MG acknowledges and agrees with many of Alexander's points. However, she argues that the problem is much bigger than Alexander recognizes and even if we solved all of the racial disparity problems/racialized policing/etc. of black folk we would still have a massive carceral problem in this country. MG looks expand's on Alexander by looking at incarceration in relation to other races, women, and poor people.).
All in all an important read, especially if one wants to understand the relationship between neoliberalism and the carceral system.
All in all an important read, especially if one wants to understand the relationship between neoliberalism and the carceral system.
October 12, 2019
I'll keep this short for now. Sociologists and criminologists must, must read this book. Hands down the best treatise on the politics of mass incarceration and historical movements within penal reform that I have ever read. Gottschalk is critical--even revolutionary-- but does not shy away from presenting material that will leave many on the 'left' profoundly challenged.
March 2, 2022
This book, like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, is eye-opening. It examines how American beliefs about incarceration and crime are misaligned with the data so we can advocate for significant changes.
March 21, 2021
Sometimes dense but comprehensive and very insightful.
April 20, 2024
There’s a lot of good information in here, but the language and examples used are outdated. Can be difficult to digest at times due to how saturated it is with facts and the author not breaking the arguments down.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews