There’s no question that, following the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddy Gray, we are witnessing a moment of unprecedented public debate about the American prison state and its relation to race, crime, and policing – no less so since Hillary Clinton made ending mass incarceration one of her first policy announcements after launching her bid for the Democratic nomination in April. This broad public debate unfolds informed by a stream of academic books that, since the late 1990s, have documented and criticized the rise and persistence of mass incarceration in the US, from Katherine Beckett’s “Making Crime Pay” (1997) and Marc Mauer’s “Race to Incarcerate” (1999) via Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” (2006) or Gottschalk’s own “The Prison and the Gallows” (2006) to more recent discussions, such as Naomi Murakawa’s “The First Civil Right” (2014) or Robert Ferguson’s “Inferno” (2014). 1 Marie Gottschalk’s “Caught” may appear to be just one more book in a long row – so why read this book, too? Or even, why read this one above other new publications?

In “Caught”, Gottschalk sets out to account for the rise and persistence of the carceral state by examining the historical conditions, causes, actors, motivations, incentives, and effects of mass incarceration, their shifts and modulations over time, as well as the reasons for why the imprisonment of over two million Americans, the highest incarceration rate worldwide, and the inhuman conditions in US jails and prisons have not been met with stronger public resistance. In particular, Gottschalk maintains that a limited understanding of the factors that gave birth to and that now uphold the carceral state has led to “misguided penal reform efforts” (p. 3), and that more complex accounts such as hers are vital to start true systemic change.

Gottschalk’s major achievement is to give us a picture of the carceral state in its multi-causal totality and its continuous, too often unnoticed, but all-pervasive chipping away at the dignity of American lives and the pillars of American democracy. The complexity of the issue, as Gottschalk lays it out before us, and the unfathomable suffering that mass incarceration has brought for Americans and America may overwhelm the reader and leave her despondent. Gottschalk, however, remains cautiously hopeful since her analysis allows her to point out clear, if not easy, avenues for change: she does not allow said reader to fall into a state of apathy. In this sense alone, “Caught” is an important intervention into the ongoing political debate.

Building on colleagues’ work such as Alexander’s, Gottschalk argues that none of the current explanations for mass incarceration can account for its rise and persistence on its own, and that none of the strategies for reform adopted by the (now bi-partisan) opposition to mass incarceration will be sufficient to dismantle the carceral state. Specifically, she argues that the color-blind racism of the post-civil rights era does not account for the overall numbers of Americans locked away, that the War on Drugs is not alone responsible for the skyrocketing numbers of imprisoned Americans, and that the neo-liberalist prison-industrial complex – often the scape-goat for critics from the Democratic spectrum – is certainly one of the forces that make it so difficult to undo the carceral state and its institutions today, but did not bring about the paradigmatic change of political culture that is at the heart of mass imprisonment.

It is this paradigmatic change that, according to Gottschalk, needs to be explained in order to undo it: Why and how has the US penal system overall become “harsher, more degrading, and less forgiving” than any other in the world (p. 6)? In ten densely researched chapters, Gottschalk shows the myriad of factors that played together on the local, state, and federal level to construct the carceral state as well as the underlying motivations of political actors. What filled and fills prisons are longer sentences, prison terms for offenses that previously did not call for prison time, the increase of life without parole, limited compassionate release for sick and aging prisoners, and the list could go on. On the federal level, the criminalization of immigration drove up the incarceration rate and explains why 35% of all inmates today are of Hispanic or Latino origin. What affects American lives and democracy additionally are the harsh conditions of punishment, such as overcrowding, lack of rehabilitative programs, solitary confinement, and the “civil death” that ex-inmates are often condemned to. What allowed these (often statutory) changes is a shift in sensibilities among key actors on both sides of the political spectrum – for reasons that Gottschalk meticulously untangles.

The most important argument that “Caught” makes is that there is no causal connection between crime rate and incarceration rate, or between public safety and the question of how many Americans are behind bars. Although this is not a new insight, Gottschalk substantiates it in unprecedented detail and follows it through in all its consequences. For reform, the independence of incarceration rates from crime rates means that a focus on small-bore reform, in particular on the three R’s (reentry, justice reinvestment, and recidivism) and lowering sentences for the non, non, nons (non-violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenders) – both of which rest on making causal connections between a crime and its punishment in the system – will not suffice to dismantle the carceral state, and may even inadvertently fortify it. Similarly, advocating for social equality and thus addressing the economic root causes of crime is a worthwhile political goal on its own, but it is not the instrument to lower incarcerations rates to the levels before 1970 any time soon.

Gottschalk’s book thus makes us pause when we look at the social justice agendas of even the least conservative players in the field for the presidential nominations: Clinton, for instance, does not advocate a comprehensive sentencing reform, but lowering sentences for the non, non, nons only as her boldest policy recommendation, and Sanders focuses on the root causes and the de-privatization of prisons – none of which will make the slightest dent in the prison population.

Gottschalk is crystal clear on what needs to be done: at the bottom of it, there needs to be a change of sensibilities so that prison will again be thought of as reserved for those who, at that particular moment in time, constitute a threat to society. This is a change that has to take place on the level of political elites and actors in the legal and penal institutions of the country, but one that has to be brought about by broad activism from below. On the basis of such a change of sensibilities, there can be a comprehensive reform that takes sentences to their pre-1970 levels, that mandates independent oversight of prisons, and that largely does away with collateral consequences of imprisonment for ex-convicts. Because Caught warns of an under-complex view of the issue at hand, of the fallacy of seeing public safety and incarceration rate as related, and of the dangers of small-bore reform, it is a book that should be read – and should be read at this particular political moment.

Sadly, the reason why this book should be read may also be the reason why, pessimistically spoken, it might not be: “Caught” appropriately complicates our understanding of the carceral state to such a degree that the picture might be too complicated for many readers. Due to its density and multi-perspectival argument, it is unlikely to find its way onto college curricula and make the broad impact that a book like Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” did. It is, moreover, unlikely, on its own, to “bring on the convulsive politics from below that we need to dismantle the carceral state” (p. 282) – but, as this reviewer hopes, it may be a starting point.

Note:
1 Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay. Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (Studies in Crime and Public Policy), New York 1997; Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, New York 1999; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York 2010; Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows. The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge Studies in Criminology), Cambridge 2006; Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right. How Liberals Built Prison America (Studies In Postwar American Political Development), New York 2014; Robert A. Ferguson, Inferno. An Anatomy of American Punishment, Cambridge 2014.