Punishing the poor
Subtitle: the neoliberal government of social insecurity
By: Loïc Wacquant.
Series: Politics, history, and culture
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Durham [NC]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780822344049; 9780822344223
Subjects: Imprisonment -- Social aspects -- United States; Imprisonment -- Social aspects -- European Union countries
Work titles: Punir les pauvres.
Description: The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive 'workfare' and expansive 'prisonfare' under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures - the teenage 'welfare mother, ' the ghetto 'street thug, ' and the roaming 'sex predator' - and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of 'small government' but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship.
Notes: "A John Hope Franklin Center book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue  : America as living laboratory for the neoliberal future; title: Social insecurity and the punitive upsurge; title: The criminalization of poverty in the post civil rights era; title: Welfare "reform" as poor discipline and statecraft; title: The great confinement of the fin de siåcle; title: The coming of carceral "big government"; title: The prison as surrogate ghetto : encaging the black subproletarians; title: Moralism and punitive panopticism : hunting down sex offenders; title: The scholarly myths of the new law-and-order reason; title: Carceral aberration comes to French; title: Theoretical coda : a sketch of the neoliberal state.