Marie Gottschalk Featured in Q&A on Mass Incarceration

Professor of Political Science Marie Gottschalk was recently featured in Penn Gazette in an article focused on her research on mass incarceration. Below is an excerpt:

According to Penn political-science professor Marie Gottschalk, neither racism nor the war on drugs fully explains the problem [of mass incarceration]; police reform isn’t enough to solve it; and even focusing on the root causes of crime might be a distraction from stepwise improvements that could make a substantial difference faster.

“The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few ardent defenders today,” she writes in Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. “But reforms to reduce the number of people in jail and prison have been remarkably modest so far.” Though a bipartisan movement to relax federal sentencing and revamp the probation system has been gathering steam, fewer than 10 percent of the men and women behind bars are in the federal system.

To read the full article, which features detailed statistics and a Q&A, click here.