The United States has spent decades perfecting a carceral machine that targets the marginalized while simultaneously granting a quiet, systemic amnesty to the powerful. While the nation built the world’s largest penal system, it executed a radical decriminalization of corporate crime, creating a bifurcated justice system where “street crime” leads to a cell and “suite crime” leads to a bonus. This divergence isn’t a glitch; it’s a feature of a state that has shifted from protecting its citizens to managing a permanent underclass.
This is the central thesis of Marie Gottschalk, the Edmund J. Kahn distinguished professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, in her latest work, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America. For Gottschalk, the rise of mass incarceration and the disappearance of corporate accountability are two sides of the same coin—a phenomenon she describes as “ultramagnified inequality.”
The Invisible Violence of the Boardroom
We are conditioned to define “crime” as interpersonal violence—a robbery, a break-in, a street fight. But Gottschalk argues this narrow definition blinds us to “social murder,” a term borrowed from Friedrich Engels. This is violence not committed by a single hand, but by structures that produce death and harm at scale.
Take the 2008 financial crisis. While millions lost their homes and pensions, the architects of the collapse largely escaped handcuffs. Gottschalk classifies this not as a market failure, but as an act of violence. Similarly, the opioid epidemic—which claimed nearly 110,000 American lives annually at its peak—was an engineered disaster. To put that in perspective, the U.S. lost roughly 55,000 soldiers over the entire decade of the Vietnam War. We have tolerated twice that many deaths in a single year.
The data suggests this isn’t just about a lack of will, but a lack of measurement. Official crime statistics rely on the FBI’s index crimes—murder, rape, arson, and so on—which determine whether people believe crime is going up or down. Corporate malfeasance simply doesn’t fit into the index, rendering the most damaging crimes in the country statistically invisible.
The Carceral Shift: From City Centers to Rural Counties
For years, the conversation around mass incarceration was—and rightly remains—centered on the disproportionate impact on Black communities in urban hubs. However, Gottschalk observes a geographic pivot. The carceral state is migrating. In states like New York and Pennsylvania, incarceration rates are dropping in the cities due to progressive prosecution, but they are climbing in rural counties.
If you live in a rural or suburban area today, you have a better chance of being incarcerated than if you live in a city. This shift complicates the political narrative. It suggests that the “anti-state state”—a term from geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore—is failing rural Americans too. These populations have carried the physical brunt of the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, returning with injuries to find a gutted welfare state and dwindling benefits.
This rural volatility is compounded by a lack of data. In these regions, police shootings are undercounted because they happen in places without strong advocacy organizations or local media to publicize them.
Beyond the Binary of Abolition and Law-and-Order
The American Left is often trapped between two extremes: maximalist abolitionism and reflexive law-and-order politics. Gottschalk proposes a third path: radical penal minimalism.
This isn’t about a sudden vacuum of authority, but a strategic shrinking of the system. Paradoxically, achieving this minimalism might require investing more in specific areas to break the cycle of incarceration.
Gottschalk challenges the obsession with “recidivism” stats, noting that many “relapses” are merely technical parole violations—minor infractions that wouldn’t lead to jail time for someone without a prior record. She argues that keeping people incarcerated long after their “criminal menopause”—the age where offending sharply drops—is a fiscal and moral absurdity, especially when a single bed in a California state prison costs roughly $120,000 a year.
Reimagining the Social Contract
Is there a place for police in a decarcerated world? Gottschalk argues yes, but not the police we have now. She points to Norway, where becoming a police officer is nearly as competitive as getting into Harvard and requires three years of training. In many U.S. states, you need more training and licensing to become a hairstylist or a nail technician than to become a police officer.
The goal is a system where the state retains a role in preventing violence, but does not use that force as a feeder system for prisons. Ultimately, the crisis of the American legal system is a crisis of legitimacy. When a CEO can bankrupt a town while corporations face deferred-prosecution agreements that function as get-out-of-jail-free cards, the social contract is broken. If we want to reduce violence, we have to stop treating the police as the only solution and start treating corporate regulation and the welfare state as the primary tools of public safety.
Does the current system of “deferred prosecution” for corporations essentially act as a legal get-out-of-jail-free card? Or is the complexity of corporate law too great for traditional criminal sentencing? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
