Crime and No Punishment
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Marie Gottschalk
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.
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Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Dedication
v -
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Epigraph
vii -
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Contents
ix -
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List of Abbreviations
xi -
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Preface
xv - I. Introduction
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1. Social Murder: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America
1 - II. State Violence at Home and Abroad
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2. Breaking Bad in America: State Violence and the Changing Carceral State
33 -
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3. Tougher Than the Rest: State Violence and US Police Forces
58 -
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4. Deadly and Professional: The Origins and Development of US Police Forces
91 -
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5. Enemies Here, There, and Everywhere: Forever at War at Home and Abroad
121 - III. Corporate and Economic Violence
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6. The Banksters Hiding in Plain Sight: The Corporate Crime Waves from Carter to Clinton
163 -
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7. Greed Is Not So Good: George W. Bush and the Financial and Foreclosure Crises
193 -
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8. Hope, Change, and Wall Street: Decriminalization of Crime in the Suites under Obama
224 -
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9. “The Banks Own This Place”: Regulation and Saving Private Capital under Obama, Trump, and Biden
268 - IV. Corporate Violence, State Violence, and Structural Violence
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10. Killing Me Softly: Big Pharma, the Government, and the Opioid Crisis
291 -
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11. Undertreated and Mistreated: The Opioid Crisis and a Nation in Pain
327 - V. Conclusion
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12. Fraught: Where Do We Go from Here?
365 -
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Acknowledgments
399 -
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Appendix: On Use of Language and Data
403 -
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Notes
407 -
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Index
555 -
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A NOTE ON THE TYPE
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