In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive ‘‘workfare’’ and expansive ‘‘prisonfare’’ are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. The model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Foucault’s vision of the ‘‘disciplinary society,’’ This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship. The paternalist penalization of poverty aims to contain the urban disorders spawned by economic deregulation and to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class. Diligent and belligerent programs of ‘‘law and order’’ entailing the enlargement and exaltation of the police, the courts, and the penitentiary have also spread across the First world because they enable political elites to reassert the authority of the state and shore up the deficit of legitimacy officials suffer when they abandon the mission of social and economic protection established during the Fordist-Keynesian era. Punishing the Poor treats the United States after the acme of the civil rights movement as the historic crucible of punitive containment as technique for the management of marginality and living laboratory of the neoliberal future Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/CRAFTINGNEOLIBERALSTATE-pub.pdf Racial gap in U.S. arrest rates: Staggering disparity usatoday/story/news/nation/2014/11/18/ferguson-black-arrest-rates/19043207/
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 01:01:18 +0000
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