Punishing the Poor

LoIc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie europEenne, Paris. He is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of the 2008 Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association. His recent books include Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, and Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. He is a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography.

Tables and Figures ix Prologue: America as Living Laboratory for the Neoliberal Future xi 1. Social Insecurity and the Punitive Upsurge 1 Part I: Poverty of the Social State 2. The Criminalization of Poverty in the Post-Civil Rights Era 41 3. Welfare "Reform" as Poor Discipline and Statecraft 76 Part II: Grandeur of the Penal State 4. The Great Confinement of the Fin de SiEcle 113 5. The Coming of Carceral "Big Government" 151 Part III. 6. The Prison as Surrogate Ghetto: Encaging the Black Subproletarians 195 7. Moralism and Punitive Panopticism: Hunting Down Sex Offenders 209 Part IV: European Declinations 8. The Scholarly Myths of the New Law-and-Order Reason 243 9. Carceral Aberration Comes to French 270 Theoretical Coda: A Sketch of the Neoliberal State 287 Acknowledgments 315 Endnotes 319 Index 367

"This powerful book shows that America's harsh penal policies are of a piece with our harsh social policies and that both can be understood as a symbolic and material apparatus to control the marginal populations created by neoliberal globalization. A tour de force!"--Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Regulating the Poor "Punishing the Poor is an incisive and unflinching indictment of neoliberal state restructuring and poverty (mis)management. It brilliantly exposes structural and symbolic consonances between 'workfare' and 'prisonfare,' and between emergent, transnational policy orthodoxies in social and penal policy. Loic Wacquant delivers a trenchant, radical, and entirely compelling analysis."--Jamie Peck, author of Workfare States "This masterful treatment of contemporary punishment policies relocates the entire field within the political sweep of the twentieth-century ascendance of economic neoliberalism and the evisceration of the welfare state. Loic Wacquant skillfully weds materialist and symbolic approaches in the best tradition of Marx and radical criminology, on the one hand, and Durkheim and Bourdieu, on the other. This provocative book is the counter-manifesto to neoliberal penalty, a must-read for all students of criminal justice and citizenship."--Bernard E. Harcourt, author of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age "Boldly conceived and carefully constructed the book details the grandeur of a penal state resourced by the plundering of the social one and dissects the attitudes that legitimate it in all its grandeur. Moreover, Wacquant not only chronicles the enthronement of the penal state in the US but also its imitative climb towards ascendancy in Western Europe...The cityscape he surveys is as ruptured and ill-lit as an urban earthquake, but his gaze is clear and steady...Urgent and timely, absorbing and alarming, Punishing the Poor should warn us that Britain's increasing dependence on our penal state and the accelerating erosion of our social state are one and the same thing, and may prove a disaster." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION BOOK OF THE WEEK, Louise Hardwick, Times Higher Education, 6th August 2009 "Punishing the Poor retains a certain power, reminding us of the hypermodern yet archaic world of prisons still in our midst" bookforum.com, Sept 2009