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: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America (Princeton UP, 2026), 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.

Professor Marie Gottschalk is the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gottschalk specializes in American politics, with a focus on criminal justice, health policy, race, the development of the welfare state, and business-labor relations.

Her latest book is Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014). She is also the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Professor Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in the People’s Republic of China. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York and was named a Distinguished Lecturer in Japan by the Fulbright Program. She served on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Task Force on Mass Incarceration and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration. She is a contributor to the Academy's final report, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (National Academies Press, 2014).

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Real Pain of Punishment: Prison, Belonging, and the Quest for Humanized Justice (Cambridge UP, 2026) highlights the concept of 'belonging' as an unprecedented lens for critically interrogating the legitimacy of incarceration across penal theory, sentencing practice, and human rights frameworks. The chapters chart pathways for bridging the gap between the normative idea of punishment and the stark realities of prison life. The final chapter, written with scholars currently and formerly incarcerated in a New York State facility, reflects on how embracing belonging within penal approaches can inform responses to harm grounded in humanization, proximity, empowerment, and collaboration. With this chapter and more, the book, advances a call for deeper epistemic dialogue within legal discourse on crime, punishment, and justice.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Rahim Kurwa about his book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing (U California Press, 2025), which examines the policing of housing in Los Angeles' northernmost suburb, Antelope Valley. Kurwa traces the suburbs' relationship with Los Angeles from post WWII to the early 2000s and 2010s, when the region saw increased Black migration as result of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program for low-income families in the nation. Kurwa contextualizes the adoption and reception of the voucher system in Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, and explores the participatory policing and criminalization practices used to evict Black residents and re-segregate the region.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges (Fordham, 2025) investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations. Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.

Guest Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, and currently holds the Zaffaroni Family Chair of Undergraduate Education. Affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of European Studies, her teaching and research interests span 19th -21st-century French and Francophone literature, memory studies, aesthetics and bio/necropolitics, critical human rights and refugee studies. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She is currently co-PI on the Mellon-funded A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times (2024-2027). Besides Arts of the Border, Dr. Sanyal has authored Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), translated into French as Mémoire et Complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2019); and The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006). She has guest-edited “Time and Politics in Contemporary Critique: Entanglements and Aftermaths” (Critical Times, 2018), ha also co-edited, with Éric Fassin, Demos Anxiety: Genealogies, Rhetorics, and Politics of Great Replacement (forthcoming in Patterns of Prejudice); with Damon Young and Mario Telò, Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler (Representations 2022), and, with Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman, Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies 118-119).

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround (U Minnesota Press, 2026) offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power. Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order. Tracing today?s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD?s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition?s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Immigration agents have a frontline view of the racial, economic, and legal inequalities that undocumented migration reflects—and yet most agents do not think of the role their jobs play in those inequalities. Instead, they consider themselves law enforcers, trained to confine their work strictly to crime control and security. In Bordering on Indifference: Immigration Agents Negotiating Race and Morality (Princeton UP, 2025), Dr. Irene Vega offers an original, detailed analysis of the rationales that shape how U.S. immigration agents understand and carry out their professional responsibilities. Drawing on interviews with ninety immigration agents—Border Patrol Agents and ICE Deportation Officers, most of whom are Mexican Americans from the region around the border—Dr. Vega examines why they took the job and how their training and socialization shape the ways that they grapple with the racial and moral issues raised by their work.
Dr. Vega shows that indifference is the bureaucratic resource that allows agents to look away from the most morally ambiguous aspects of their work and helps them cultivate legitimacy for their employer. She traces the development of the agents’ “moral economy”—the configuration of norms, values, and sensibilities that undergirds how they perform their work. She also shows how the immigration system benefits from minoritized bureaucrats’ labor. With Bordering on Indifference, Dr. Vega opens the closed doors of nondescript government buildings and goes into remote areas of the Southwestern borderlands to uncover the hidden normative world that immigration enforcement agents inhabit.

Guest: Dr. Irene I. Vega is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how the United States regulates international migration, as well as migrants and their descendants.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

• A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders
• Immigration Realities
• We Are Not Dreamers
• Secret Harvests
• Who Gets Believed
• In The Care of Foreigners
• In The Garden Behind The Moon
• We Take Our Cities With Us
• The Translators Daughter
• Reunited
• Sin Padres Ni Papeles

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are.

In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity (New Press, 2026), Dr. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched stereotypes.

Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Dr. Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There were two days to Christmas and Lewis felt like everything was spinning out of control. He wondered what he would say to the judge this time. His client, Rikihana, was already on multiple shoplifting charges. What’s a few more? Lewis thought. These supermarkets were still making a killing.

It’s late 2020. Rikihana Wallace, a prolific shoplifter of no fixed abode, is back in prison with little chance of bail. Nathan Morley, unemployed, is facing burglary charges and hoping his other, as yet undetected, offences don’t catch up with him. Lewis Skerrett, their overstretched legal aid lawyer, is trying to do right by them both.

The culmination of over two years of field research and hundreds of hours of interviews, The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City (Bridget Williams Books, 2026) follows these three Hutt Valley men through courtrooms, prison, hospital, rehab, boarding houses and welfare offices. Told largely in verbatim dialogue, this up-close and personal account brings the realities of the New Zealand criminal justice system to life through the voices of those who experience it first-hand.

Watch the book trailer here 

Asher Emanuel is a writer and lawyer based in Wellington. His exposure to the criminal justice system began when he was a judges’ clerk at the Wellington High Court after graduating from law school in 2015. He later worked as an investigator for the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security and, as a lawyer, has assisted several government inquiries. His writing on justice and policy issues has appeared in The Spinoff, the New Zealand Herald, and specialist publications, and he is a former editor of Policy.nz, an election policy website. He began work on his first book, The Valley, in 2018 supported by grants from the Michael & Suzanne Borrin Foundation. Asher now works as a civil legal aid lawyer focusing on public law and human rights cases. He is a longstanding member of the executive of the Aotearoa Legal Workers’ Union. Asher grew up in Auckland before moving to Wellington where he studied law and English literature.

Ed Amon has a Master of Indigenous Studies and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a writer and a Stand-up Comedian. His main interests are indigenous studies, politics, history, and cricket. Follow him on twitter @edamoned or email him at edamonnz@gmail.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.