How Did the U.S. Become a Prison State? And How Do We Get Out? | Big Think

How Did the U.S. Become a Prison State? And How Do We Get Out?

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You already know the statistics: The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of the population. But do you know why?

University of Pennsylvania professor Marie Gottschalk is an expert on the politics of incarceration and author of the book Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. In this video interview, professor Gottschalk details the sequence of events that led to the American prison state. From overstated crime statistics to race-based political dealings to the political benefit of looking tough, the saga of the U.S. as warden continues to reap heavy consequences for nearly all parts of society.

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MARIE GOTTSCHALK:

Marie Gottschalk is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

She has a B.A. in history from Cornell University, an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Marie Gottschalk: The United States is the world’s leading warden. It has more people incarcerated in prison and jail in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the population than any other country in the world. So it incarcerates about 700 per 100,000 people in prison or jail. This is about five to 12 times the rate of other Western countries and Japan. We’ve got about 160,000 people who are serving life sentences in the United States now and a number of them who are serving life in prison without the possibility of parole in some cases equals the entire prison populations of other large countries.

In my state alone of Pennsylvania, we’re spending as much to send somebody, keep someone in a state prison as to send them to college in some of the leading colleges or universities in the state for the year. There’s a political issue about the legitimacy of the political system that locks up so many people and disproportionately locks up so many people of color and so many people who are poor.

Up until the early 1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate was fairly stable and it didn’t gyrate too much up, too much down and was in keeping with other Western countries in Europe — maybe a little bit on the high side. The reasons why we got here — the immediate reasons are that the United States began passing much more punitive legislation and police and prosecutors began using their discretion in a much more punitive direction. The underlying causes of this are the political response to a spike in crime between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s when homicide rates doubled. And then the politics became kind of like a broken thermostat where crime didn’t keep escalating and escalating, but there was a perception that crime kept escalating and it was very useful for political purposes to exploit crime data and what we call law and order politics........

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