The Prison and the Gallows

Marie Gottschalk is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a PhD in political science from Yale University and an MPA from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She is the author of The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000). She is a a former associate editor of World Policy Journal and a former associate director of the World Policy Institute in New York City.

• 1. The prison and the gallows: the construction of the carceral state in America; 2. Law, order, and alternative explanations; 3. Unlocking the past: the nationalization and politicization of law and order; 4. The carceral state and the welfare state: the comparative politics of victims; 5. Not the usual suspects: feminists, women's groups, and the anti-rape movement; 6. The battered women's movement and the development of penal policy; 7. From rights to revolution: prison activism and penal policy; 8. Capital punishment, the courts, and the early origins of the carceral state, 1920s–60s; 9. The power to punish: the political development of capital punishment, 1972 to today; 10. Conclusion: whither the carceral state.

"The Prison and the Gallows brings politics (both the state and organized interests) back into a discussion that has been preoccupied with society (modernity) and with social structures (race and the economy). Gottschalk does not, however, tell a politician or partisanship story, the longstanding familiar one of “running on crime” and submitting to the pressures of electoral realignment. Rather her extraordinarily original and paradoxical “story” is the much more challenging one – about the very most reformist movements in society that might have, but did not, resist or redirect carceral expansion. This is an exquisitely-written book and one which meets the highest standards of academic scholarship." --Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Cornell University