Marie Gottschalk, the Edmund J. Kahn Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently received the 2026 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for her book Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power, and Violence in America (Princeton University Press, 2025). Presented by the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the award honors a work that “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes — his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.”
In her award-winning book, Dr. Gottschalk examines how concentrated economic and political power in the United States has fostered forms of violence stemming from C-suite corporate executives. The monograph is Dr. Gottschalk’s fourth book. Her other works include Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014), The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States (Cornell University Press, 2000).
Before joining the Penn faculty, Dr. Gottschalk served as an editor and journalist and spent two years as a university lecturer in China. 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 of High Rates of Incarceration.
Dr. Gottschalk holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She earned a master of public administration degree from Princeton University and master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from Yale University.