Marie Gottschalk has spent more than two decades meticulously researching the origins and documenting the consequences of American mass incarceration. Her books The Prison and the Gallows and Caught are both foundational texts for anyone seeking to understand how the United States built the world’s largest penal system.

In her new book, Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America, Gottschalk turns her attention to the crimes that never end up penalized, from the corporate malfeasance behind the 2008 financial crisis to the engineered opioid epidemic to the slow-motion violence of state neglect. For Gottschalk, mass incarceration and the mass decriminalization of corporate and white-collar crime are not separate stories but two facets of the same phenomenon of ultramagnified inequality.

Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn distinguished professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke with her about “street crime” and “suite crime,” how rural America has quietly become subject to incarceration patterns previously associated with urban environments, whether there’s a role for police and prisons in an ideal society, and the concept of “radical penal minimalism” — a framework she thinks may offer the Left a way out of the trap of maximalist abolitionism versus reflexive law-and-order politics.