The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

Abstract

Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who previously has written about the welfare state and health care, offers an extraordinarily ambitious and comprehensive analysis using history and political science to try to explain why, over the last three decades, the United States has built a carceral state that is unrivalled in size among Western countries. The author attempts to analyze both the construction of the state and federal prison system and the retention of prison-based capital punishment as related aspects of the same punishment-oriented syndrome. Most penological studies look at just one or the other sanction. Her thoroughly documented and lucid work marshals a wide array of sources to trace the development of that part of America's huge penal complex since the beginning of its unprecedented growth in the early 1970s. To her credit, Gottschalk furnishes important historical background from the colonial, Jacksonian, and Progressive eras to buttress her argument: throughout American history, crime and punishment have always been central features of American political development. She also compares several noteworthy U.S. developments with those in Western Europe, showing how America's law-and-order policies have diverged from the more moderate and effective approaches adopted by other nations. Along the way, the author devotes special attention to women's issues, incorporating efforts to address rape and domestic violence into her account of Americans' punitive approach.