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Crime and No Punishment

Wealth, Power, and Violence in America
  • Marie Gottschalk
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025
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About this book

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.

Reviews

"A distinguished political scientist condemns the ‘social murder’ of America’s working people committed by corporations, the wealthy, and the state. . . . A clearsighted analysis of the systemic class war that the 1 percent is waging on the rest—and without penalty."


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I. Introduction

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II. State Violence at Home and Abroad

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III. Corporate and Economic Violence

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IV. Corporate Violence, State Violence, and Structural Violence

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V. Conclusion

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 18, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780691275260
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
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