Crime or insecurity: Who is ‘the state’? And what is it ‘responding’ to?

[Jackpine Radical]

(Book reviews by Heather Schoenfeld)
Punishment & Society 2011 13: 473 DOI: 10.1177/1462474511401507

Lo ̈ıc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (expanded edn), University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN: 2009; 232 pp.: 0816639019 (pbk)
Lo ̈ıc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2009; 408 pp.: 082234422X (pbk)

Originally published in French over 10 years ago, Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty is finally available to English-language scholars. Along with the English-language publication of Punishing the Poor (original publication 2004), and the soon to be published Deadly Symbiosis, the expanded edition represents the culmination of Wacquant’s thinking about the ascendancy of the penal state. Beyond theorizing this rise, both books nicely lay out the convergence and functional equivalence of welfare supervision and penal sanctioning (see Haney, 2004 for the first treatment of this convergence). The books also aim to warn European policymakers about the myths and consequences of the American model of penal excess. Briefly told, Europeans should not be fooled by the United States’ ‘successful’ crime control policies. In reality, these policies are a key component of the transnational ‘neo- liberal’ project to ‘remake the nexus of market, state and citizenship’ according to logics that promote ‘the market’ (by deregulating the economy), retract the welfare state, cultivate the trope of ‘individual responsibility’, and expand the penal appa- ratus (Punishing, pp. 306, 307).1
As Wacquant makes clear in the Afterword to Prisons, policymakers and the public all over the world have enthusiastically engaged with his ideas. But given the peripheral place of scholarship within American political discourse, the discussion in the United States is likely to be confined to scholarly arenas. Fortunately, both books should command a large academic audience as they push theoretical bound- aries and challenge research agendas in sociology and political science and in the subfields of political sociology, welfare state analysis, and investigations of inequal- ity, not to mention crime and punishment. In addition, the 10-year lag in publica- tion gives English-language scholars the chance to evaluate the role the books have played in the resistance to neoliberal global hegemony.


Although the books’ arguments and evidence overlap, they are distinguished by their relative strengths. While Punishing the Poor is a more explicit and thorough presentation of Wacquant’s thesis, Prisons of Poverty more closely adheres to a Bourdieuian methodological framework (Bourdieu, 1990, 1996). In both books Wacquant argues that welfare and penal policies in the second half of the 20th century are a ‘twinned state response’ to the ‘generalization of social insecurity’; a phenomenon that is presumed to originate from aspects of the neoliberal project itself (economic deregulation, fragmentation of wage labor, increase in economic inequality) and the upending of racial hierarchies in the post-civil rights era.2 These policies, he argues, work to ‘normalize’ this insecurity in three related ways (see Punishing, pp. 3–11). First, by re-inventing penal and welfare bureaucracies to supervise and warehouse members of stigmatized groups that are marginal to the restructured economy, these policies render the poor invisible (or at least morally culpable). Second, by gutting welfare benefits and social insurance programs, forc- ing welfare recipients to accept substandard and insecure jobs and increasing sur- veillance and penalties for crime, these policies ‘impose precarious wage labor as a new norm of citizenship’ for the lower and lower middle class (Punishing, p. xv). Third, by creating categories (i.e. ‘welfare queen’ and ‘street thug’ and ‘pedophile’), these policies provide symbolic ‘others’ that elected officials can use to boost their legitimacy and re-affirm the authority of the state as it retreats from objectively decreasing social insecurity.

Sorry, I can't provide a link because it's paid access, but you can find the journal in any academic library.