Marie Gottschalk

White-collar and corporate crime is largely invisible to us. We don’t count it; we don’t measure it. Official crime statistics are based on the FBI’s index crimes — murder, rape, arson, and so on — and those are what determine whether people believe crime is going up or down. Corporate crime doesn’t figure into that picture at all.

My book is partly a mea culpa. Those of us who study criminal justice have spent so much energy on mass incarceration — who goes to prison, at what rate, and why — that we missed the other half of the story: while the United States was building the largest incarceration system in the world, it was simultaneously carrying out a radical decriminalization of corporate crime. The book is about how those two trends are connected. What I try to do in Crime and No Punishment is get readers to step back from a narrow definition of “crime” — which in most people’s minds means interpersonal violence, or street crime — and think instead about violence writ large: who is causing harm, who is causing premature death.

The US has become one of the most violent countries in the developed world, whether you measure that by declining life expectancy, traffic deaths, incarceration rates, or the militarization of police and the resulting civilian deaths. At the same time, we have staggering income inequality contributing to that decline in life expectancy, and we have what the geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “anti-state state” — a state that no longer feels it has a duty to protect the society it governs. That combination produces what I borrow from Friedrich Engels to call “social murder.” It’s not one person killing another by hand; it’s underlying structures producing death and harm at scale.

The 2008 financial crisis is a good example. I call it an act of violence. People lost homes, pensions, jobs — and unlike past recessions, the recovery was radically uneven. The coasts and the tech hubs bounced back; large parts of “flyover country” never really did. The opioid crisis is another. At its peak a few years ago, close to 110,000 Americans a year were dying of overdoses. To put that in perspective: over the entire decade the United States was in Vietnam, about 55,000 Americans were killed, an experience that seared itself into the national memory. Here we have twice that many deaths in a single year, and we’ve simply tolerated it.

Marie Gottschalk

What I’m trying to do in the book is push people toward a bigger political-economy view. And one important piece of that bigger picture is that the carceral state is not static — it’s changing geographically. It made sense in the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s to focus on urban areas, because that’s where incarceration was most intense. But over the last decade, we’ve seen something close to a flip: 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.

Some of that is the effect of progressive prosecutors and criminal-justice-reform coalitions anchored in urban centers, but we also see pronounced changes in rural areas. Look at New York state: the decline in incarceration is being driven by New York City, while rural areas are seeing increases. Pennsylvania shows the same pattern: a dramatic decline in Philadelphia, an increase out in the rural counties. That complicates how we think about race and incarceration, because some of the whitest, most rural counties in my state incarcerate people at very high rates, often in some of the most decrepit jails in the country, buildings well over a hundred years old.

This matters for coalition-building. If we want to challenge the carceral state, we need to understand what’s happening in rural America too. The same is likely true of police violence — we don’t have great data, but you probably have a higher chance of being shot and killed by police in a rural area than an urban one. Those deaths are undercounted because they happen in places without strong advocacy organizations or local media to publicize them.

Rural America has also disproportionately carried the physical burden of the forever wars. People in rural areas were far more likely to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Actual combat deaths were relatively low, but the number of veterans who came home with serious physical or mental injuries was high — and this happened just as the country was cutting benefits for veterans and National Guard members. That’s another form of state violence that stays largely invisible. All of this is part of why I think it’s too simple to say that rural voters went for Trump purely out of misogyny and racism. There are many factors that have been brewing for a long time, and in some ways Trump is almost incidental to the underlying story.

If you actually want to reduce violence, you have to invest in the welfare-state side of things — jobs, health care, schools, neighborhoods — and you have to reinvest in corporate regulation. If we only focus on the police and the prisons as “the problem,” there simply isn’t enough money to squeeze out of that system to fund what’s actually needed. If activists are focused narrowly on defunding the police, there just isn’t enough there to fund the things that need to be funded. We have to look concretely at tax policy, redistribution, and winding down the military budget.

Marie Gottschalk

If your position is that we have to fix everything before we can make progress on decarceration, that’s ignoring some various obvious issues we can address right now. For example, if you just look at age demographics, leaving aside class or geography, the highest-crime population is young people in their late teens and early twenties, particularly young men. We can observe a kind of “criminal menopause,” where offending drops off sharply with age. So what’s the purpose of keeping people incarcerated for decades after that? It’s now costing roughly $120,000 a year to house someone in a California state prison, and the vast majority of incarcerated people are eventually going to come out anyway.

So yes, we can identify areas like these and start decarcerating now. A lot of the fear here rests on an overreliance on recidivism statistics, which are much shakier than people assume. You’ll often hear that two-thirds of people released “recidivate” within three years, without any explanation of what that means. In many cases, it’s a technical parole violation or a minor offense that, absent a prior record, wouldn’t have led to incarceration at all. In a lot of European countries, a prior record barely factors into sentencing. Our recidivism statistics are not actually a good predictor of public safety.

Marie Gottschalk

Police are on the front lines of everything that’s failing: drugs, poverty, and the absence of adequate jobs, housing, and mental health care. We hand them that tray and say, “Fix it,” and all we actually give them are guns and more military hardware. As a society, we need to own those problems instead of just dumping them on police and saying policing can never work.

I do believe, after years of thinking about this, that a genuinely different law enforcement institution is possible — one that does what it’s supposed to do. It would probably look different enough from what we have now that we might reasonably call it something else. But police forces exist all over the world, under that name, functioning very differently from ours. I’ve visited prisons all over the world too, and a prison in Berlin operates nothing like the state’s largest facility just outside Philadelphia. Becoming a police officer in Norway is nearly as competitive as getting into Harvard, and it requires three years of training. In many US states, you need more training and licensing to become a hairstylist or a nail technician than to become a police officer. That’s a real, fixable failure, not a reason to conclude that the institution itself is beyond redemption.

There will probably always be some role for police in any functioning society. Sometimes you need the police to intervene. If someone’s breaking into your house with a gun, you’re not going to want a peace circle. But you also don’t necessarily want ten officers and a SWAT response that endangers everyone even more. There’s a middle ground. It’s also worth thinking right now about Charlottesville, where the police stood down while a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd and killed Heather Heyer. If you want to defund or eliminate the police at a moment when the Right is actively organizing and marching, you have to think hard about what that means.

My book does document how, in a number of places, police forces are increasingly infiltrated by the Right, and how police and military service function as recruiting grounds for white supremacist organizations. We have to acknowledge that reality. But I don’t think it’s accurate to lump “the police” together as a single undifferentiated entity. Albuquerque has an extraordinarily high rate of police killings of civilians compared to New York City. Those differences matter. Insisting that police everywhere are equally bad and should simply be abolished flattens real variation, and I think that’s its own kind of arrogance.

If we actually believe interpersonal violence has root causes — poverty, class inequity, racial inequity — then we have to recognize that in certain communities, violence tracks those indicators regardless of things like the “war on drugs.” Police need to be available to intervene and, where they can’t, to solve crimes. Roughly half of homicides in this country go unsolved. The families of murder victims generally aren’t demanding the death penalty or even necessarily a life sentence, but they do want some acknowledgment of the magnitude of their loss and some assurance that the person responsible won’t do it again. We need not only police for that but a whole functioning criminal justice system.

As for prisons, punishment serves a social function beyond direct incapacitation. It’s a statement that a given act is unacceptable. But it doesn’t have to involve torture or the conditions in most American prisons and jails today. When I teach my own book and we get to the final chapter on corporate violence and particularly the villains of the financial crisis, my students say: these people caused enormous harm; they should go to prison. And I tell them truthfully: that would satisfy a retributive impulse, but it wouldn’t solve the underlying structural problems.

Still, I don’t want to see them writing best-selling memoirs either. I’d like to see truth commissions. I’d like to see corporate executives personally charged, rather than corporations alone facing deferred-prosecution agreements that function as get-out-of-jail-free cards. There’s a wide range of sanctions available short of imprisonment. And some people probably do need to end up in prison or jail but not be subjected to current inhumane conditions.

Marie Gottschalk

I’m a real admirer of many people who identify as abolitionists, and I think “abolition” can be a capacious term. But I’ve become drawn to another phrase some people are using now: radical penal minimalism. Paradoxically, radical penal minimalism might actually mean investing more in certain parts of the system in order to shrink it overall.

For example, Pennsylvania is nearly the worst state in the country for funding public defenders. The state itself put essentially zero dollars toward it until very recently, and it still lags far behind other states; counties are left to cover it, and the American Civil Liberties Union just filed a lawsuit over conditions here. A purist abolitionist might balk at “expanding” any part of the criminal legal apparatus. But if expanding it means better public defenders, more diversion programs, more opportunities for community service, more careful attention to mitigation, or even potentially better-paid and better-trained prosecutors who stay in the work rather than burning out, then that’s a path to radical penal minimalism in practice.

Marie Gottschalk

On this point, I’m heavily influenced by James Forman Jr, a Yale Law professor and former Washington, DC, public defender who wrote Locking Up Our Own — a deep dive into why DC, a majority-black city with a black city council and black mayor, became one of the most punitive jurisdictions in the country. His answer was that black communities have genuine, well-founded fears of street crime but also that it’s not as simple as “people want more police.”

Polling consistently shows that people in those communities simultaneously feel that they are being overpoliced and underprotected. In truth, public opinion in these communities tends to be “all of the above.” Philadelphia’s last mayoral race had local polling on this, and Los Angeles’s recent polling shows the same pattern. The press likes to quote it selectively as “people want more police,” but if you also ask whether they want more spending on schools, jobs, clean streets, libraries, and community centers, the answer is overwhelmingly yes to all of it.

Marie Gottschalk

That’s the hardest question in the book really — whether we’re in a cycle of violence, and I don’t just mean interpersonal violence. We have the highest rate of private gun ownership of any country in the world. How do you run a functioning society that is that heavily armed? Some of the explanation for higher rural police-shooting rates is that officers know nearly everyone is carrying, and there are fewer mental-health services available to divert people before a crisis. That’s an extremely combustible combination, especially with smaller departments, less training, and sheriffs who are largely unaccountable to the public.

The book can be bleak on this point. Are we becoming a dysfunctional state, one that’s failing at the basic obligation to protect its people from violence in all its forms, including drugs, including opioids? I often think about how shocked people were in the 1990s that life expectancy was declining in the collapsing Soviet Union. It was treated as proof of systemic failure. The United States has had its own unprecedented decline in life expectancy, in a country that spent the twentieth century as a leader in exactly that metric. And it’s declining unevenly, dropping fastest among poor and working-class white people, even as black and white life expectancy converge. Some of that convergence reflects real gains for black Americans, but a lot of it reflects a decline for white Americans. Is that really an achievement, equality reached by leveling down?

Marie Gottschalk

I used to call the United States a “carceral democracy.” Now I’m not sure the “democracy” half still holds; even that’s been enfeebled. My book comes around to the idea that the fundamental legitimacy of the state is genuinely in question, and when that legitimacy is in question, it hollows out democratic institutions themselves. That adds a special urgency to our effort to understand the crimes committed and violence perpetrated not only on the streets but by people in power.