After studying the origins and politics of mass incarceration, Marie Gottschalk of the University of Pennsylvania has taken her research one step further, focusing on the idea of a “carceral state” with millions of people in prison, on probation or on parole who are still “detained” through monitoring. 

A professor of political science in the School of Arts & Sciences, Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with an emphasis on criminal justice, health policy, race and the development of the welfare state. She has taught at Penn since 1997.  

Her research intrigued filmmaker Ava DuVernay and led to Gottschalk’s appearance in “13th,” a Netflix documentary about mass incarceration that refers to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, but left a fairly exploitable loophole: “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”  

Gottschalk was one of about 30 academics, historians, activists and politicians included in the documentary, the first of that genre to open the New York Film Festival.  

In “13th,” DuVernay chronicles the history of mass incarceration and how it is permitted under the Constitution, outlining the ways in which political strategies have contributed to the situation and uncovering how large prison populations have created billion-dollar industries.  

The documentary also focuses on the racial and economic dimensions, but Gottschalk explained there are other important considerations, too.  

“We have to frame mass incarceration not just in racial terms but to see how racial factors coincide and interact with other factors,” Gottschalk said. “Mass incarceration controls a dispossessed population. While originally directed at African-Americans, can this carceral state and these controlling conditions be migrating to include other marginalized populations, too?”  

Gottschalk said the fastest-growing prison population is white women.  

“Look at Ohio,” she said, “the biggest influx of offenders are white women in rural areas charged with opiate and other drug offenses. Data show the ‘carceral state’ is coming down hard on rural areas and on people who are white.”
 
Gottschalk’s work has also contributed to the development of the exhibition, “Prisons Today,” at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of Philadelphia’s most well-known historic sites.
 
Unveiled earlier this year, “Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration” looks at the history, effectiveness and fairness of the U.S. criminal justice system, thanks in part to Gottschalk’s research. She lent her expertise to simplify the developers’ ideas on the many ways to present mass incarceration without reinforcing negative stereotypes.  

“Prisons Today” asks visitors open-ended questions and asks them to share their stories, challenging each visitor would self-define as “a criminal.” 

“Most of us break the law, but this contests the idea that we separate who is and who is not a criminal,” said Gottshalk. “The biggest challenge is to tell a lot of individual stories but still make the connection to creating change on a larger scale.” 

“Prisons Today” ties personal stories to larger social, political and socioeconomic forces, offering a section on areas where people are unable to vote based on criminal convictions. 

“With so many involved with the criminal-justice system, it really impacts all of us in terms of its effects on the quality of our democracy,” Gottschalk said. “It influences the outcomes of elections because of massive voter disenfranchisement.” 

She said that Eastern State is also training its tour guides to talk about the issues surrounding mass incarceration. 

“Today is a historical moment when it comes to mass incarceration, solitary confinement and the carceral state,” she said. 

Her latest book, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, uses the issue of criminal-justice reform and the carceral state as a window into the larger pathology of American politics with the wide gap between the enormous problems the country faces and the inability of the political system to address those issues.  

The book garnered the attention of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who cited Gottschalk’s work, among others, in her dissent this year in Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case stemming from an unlawful search and seizure. Sotomayor noted the ruling hints that people are not citizens in a democracy but rather “the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be catalogued.”