Caught

Gottschalk provides a systematic, surprising, and scathing critique of the prison state... Caught may well be the best book on this subject to appear in decades. --Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post Gottschalk is particularly convincing about the follow-on effects of incarceration on the vulnerable neighborhoods that contribute most to the prison population. --Jakub Wrzewniewski, Pacific Standard An encyclopedic synthesis of recent scholarly work and journalism on criminal justice, Caught spans a wide range of topics but has a simple refrain: Beware of bipartisan reformers bearing gifts. Politicians pretend that hard problems are easy and make easy problems hard. Gottschalk, to her credit, is no politician. --Sara Mayeux, Chronicle Review Everyone ... should read this book. --Angelia Wilson, Times Higher Education Gottschalk has done a public service. She has tried to untangle a fiendishly complex subject, helping to liberate her readers from the intellectual prison of conventional wisdom in the process. --Gary Silverman, Financial Times Marie Gottschalk's commanding and disturbing Caught is our best guide to the political decisions and public policies that have created the carceral state and our present immobility on the issue of crime and its punishment... Caught is that relatively rare academic book that hopes to move both public debate and policy. --Michael Meranze, Los Angeles Review of Books [D]evastatingly persuasive... Caught proves not only an authoritative companion to the criminal justice system crises you know, but also a thorough compendium of the crises you've never even considered. --Stephen Lurie, Los Angeles Review of Books [A] powerful book. --Choice Gottschalk convincingly shows that the American penal system has come to embody a very un-American idea: that there are lives that are not worth caring about and people beyond reforming. --The Christian Century Gottschalk's analysis offers a strong counternarrative to existing quick-fix solutions to mass incarceration. --James Kilgore, Truthout Caught is an impressive accomplishment. --Bob Lane, Metapsychology Caught is hard-hitting book on all that is wrong with the American carceral state. Importantly, it also shows why previous reform efforts have failed. --Eleanor Healy-Birt, Interlib