Many people reading these words probably believe that jailing more people would reduce the amount of crime. Not Marie Gottschalk.

It may be counterintuitive, but the longtime resident of Chestnut Hill, political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of four books on the criminal justice system dissents from this view.

“I served on the National Academy of Sciences panel on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration,” Gottschalk told the Local last week. “One of the central findings of our massive 2014 report was that locking up more people has at most a marginal impact on reducing crime rates. High incarceration rates may actually contribute to increases in crime by destabilizing communities and reducing funding available for vital items like housing, health care, infrastructure and education that lower crime rates by providing ‘thick public safety,’ which is much preferred to spending more on police and prisons.”

Gottschalk will be giving a talk on Monday, Nov. 16, at the Free Library of Philadelphia on her latest book, “Crime and No Punishment: Wealth, Power and Violence in America,” which won the 2026 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award from the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center.

“The findings of decades of research on what explains trends in violent street crime over the long term,” she added, “especially homicide rates, are remarkably robust. Certain structural factors, including higher rates of poverty, income inequality and gun ownership, predict higher rates of homicide. So do other structural factors that are often related to income inequality, including residential segregation, pervasive economic discrimination and the lack of thriving neighborhood and community groups.

“Notably, some of the highest rates of homicide (and suicide) in the country are in predominantly rural areas with high levels of gun ownership and poverty and low levels of social services and other community supports.”

Gottschalk is a former editor and journalist and was a university lecturer for two years in 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.

A native of Long Island, Gottschalk earned a B.A. in history from Cornell University in 1980, an M.A. in public affairs from Princeton University in 1985, a second M.A. in political science in 1995 and Ph.D. in political science in 1998, both from Yale University. She moved to Philadelphia in 1997 when she began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

Another issue that looms large in Gottschalk’s writings is that while street crime is a major issue in the public consciousness, corporate crime is generally downplayed and often goes unpunished.

“Public and scholarly attention remains fixated on street crime,” she said, “although corporate malfeasance directly and indirectly harms far more people in the United States. That is starting to change as record numbers of people surveyed in the United States identify corruption as a leading concern.”

If Gottschalk could make one major change in the criminal justice system, what would it be? “I would decrease the incarceration rate to what it was for most of modern U.S. history and to a rate comparable to that of other Western democracies,” she said. “That would mean slashing the current rate of about 600 per 100,000 by more than 75 percent.”

Does she have any hope that the system will change? “I could not do what I do if I did not have hope that the pathologies of American politics that I analyze can be remedied,” she replied. “But as James Baldwin once said, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’”

Marie Gottschalk’s talk will take place at the Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine St., Room 108, on Nov. 16, 6 p.m. For more information, email mgottsch@sas.upenn.edu. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.