About

Marie Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on political science topics related to her expertise, although specific details about her research focus, background, and key contributions are not provided in the page text. She is a faculty member within the Department of Political Science and holds a distinguished professorship, indicating her prominence in her field.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Criminology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Law and economics
• Political economy
• Geography
• Public administration
• Psychiatry
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Engineering ethics
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Gender studies
• Anthropology
• Epistemology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Crime and No Punishment

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-10-30

  book1st authorCorresponding

  How concentrated economic and political power in America protects elites and fosters violence of all kinds The United States is an exceptionally violent country, increasingly unable or unwilling to stem violence in its many forms. A growing corporate crime wave has gone unprosecuted and unpunished, with those in the C-suites largely escaping accountability. Meanwhile, the country has doubled down on pursuing people accused of street and drug crimes and immigration offenses. Corporate impunity, the financialization of the economy, militarized policing, the burgeoning carceral state, and the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere all have fostered corporate, economic, and state violence in America. In Crime and No Punishment , Marie Gottschalk argues that these developments have undermined the legitimacy of American political and economic institutions. Gottschalk analyzes how the concentration of economic, political, and military power has siphoned off vital resources, preying on the most vulnerable communities and normalizing violence and death. It has kept America from attacking the root causes of violent street crime and curtailing “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and chronic diseases. The United States continues to incarcerate more of its people than nearly every other country even as it decriminalizes or turns a blind eye to elite-level corporate crime. Public and scholarly attention, however, remains fixated on violent street crime—although corporate and white-collar crime and state and economic violence directly and indirectly hurt far more people in the United States. Gottschalk contends that the US failure to protect its people from these harms has increased the fragility of democracy in America.

  PublisherDOI

• The Opioid Crisis: The War on Drugs Is Over. Long Live the War on Drugs

  Annual Review of Criminology · 2022 · 53 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Public administration

  A closer examination of media coverage, the response of law enforcement and policy makers, the legislative record, and the availability of proven, high-quality treatments for substance abuse casts doubt on claims that the country pivoted toward public health and harm-reduction strategies to address the opioid crisis because its victims were disproportionately white people. Law enforcement solutions directed at people who use and sell street drugs continue to far outpace public health and harm-reduction strategies. Government support for expanding access to proven treatments for opioid use disorder that save and rebuild lives remains paltry given the scale of this public health catastrophe. And although the rhetoric has been somewhat more sympathetic, at times it rivals the excesses of the crack era. The article examines the various phases of the opioid crisis as they have unfolded over the past 25 years; related geographic and racial shifts in overdose fatalities with each new phase; media coverage of the crisis; the federal government's response, including by the US Congress and presidents from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden; punitive developments at the state and local levels; and the country's poor record on prevention and making effective treatment widely available for people with substance use disorder.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• American Political Development and the Crises in American Politics

  Studies in American Political Development · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Political economy

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Deplorable or Disposable? The Carceral State and ‘Breaking Bad’ in Rural America

  British Academy eBooks · 2021-01-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the limitations of viewing the US carceral state primarily through a racial disparities lens centred on differences in incarceration rates between whites and blacks. It surveys important shifts since the 1970s in who is being incarcerated in the United States, including racial, ethnic, gender, and geographic shifts, most notably between urban and rural areas. It deploys three common frameworks used to help explain the rise of mass incarceration and the hyper-incarceration of African Americans—the culture of control, the culture of poverty, and the war on drugs—to analyse the deepening penetration of the carceral state outside of major urban areas and to examine the opioid crisis.

  PublisherDOI

• No Star State: What’s Right and Wrong About Criminal Justice Reform in Texas

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDF

• Caught in the Countryside: Race, Class, and Punishment in Rural America

  Political power and social theory · 2020 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology

  Abstract Discussion of the 2016 electorate has centered on two poles: results of public opinion and voter surveys that attempt to tease out whether racial, cultural, or economic grievances were the prime drivers behind the Trump vote and analyses that tie major shifts in the political economy to consequential shifts in the voting behavior of certain demographic and geographic groups. Both approaches render invisible a major development since the 1970s that has been transforming the political, social, and economic landscape of wide swaths of people who do not reside in major urban areas or their prosperous suburban rings: the emergence and consolidation of the carceral state. This chapter sketches out some key contours of the carceral state that have been transforming the polity and economy for poor and working-class people, with a particular focus on rural areas and the declining Rust Belt. It is meant as a correction to the stilted portrait of these groups that congealed in the aftermath of the 2016 election, thanks to their pivotal contribution to Trump's victory. This chapter is not an alternative causal explanation that identifies the carceral state as the key factor in the 2016 election. Rather, it is a call to aggressively widen the analytical lens of studies of the carceral state, which have tended to focus on communities of color in urban areas.

  PublisherDOI

• 7. No Way Out?

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mission Statement

  Studies in American Political Development · 2020 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  We are honored to have the opportunity to serve as the latest editors of Studies in American Political Development . We wish to thank and credit Anthony Chen and Eric Schickler for their outstanding service and contributions. First established by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek in 1986 as a space for theoretical, methodological, and substantive commitments intrinsic in the study of American political development (APD), we look forward to maintaining the journal's esteemed reputation as a place for important questions and empirically rich and theoretically innovative answers.

  PublisherDOI

• 7. Adrift And On The Defensive: Labor And The Defeat Of Clinton's Health Security Act

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-09-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bibliography

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-09-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kimberley Johnson

  2 shared

• Mary Fainsod Katzenstein

  University of Victoria

  2 shared

• Paul Frymer

  2 shared

• Courtney Fung

  1 shared

• Julie Ajinkya

  1 shared

• Lindsay Proudfoot

  1 shared

• Jon B. Gould

  1 shared

• Joshua B. Miller

  University of Melbourne

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Hist…
• Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program