Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, 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.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"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 penality, 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"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Punishing the Poor

Duke University Press

Contents

Tables and Figures....................................................................ixPrologue: America as Living Laboratory of the Neoliberal Future.......................xi1. Social Insecurity and the Punitive Upsurge.........................................12. The Criminalization of Poverty in the Post-Civil Rights Era........................413. Welfare "Reform" as Poor Discipline and Statecraft.................................764. The Great Confinement of the Fin de Sicle.........................................1135. The Coming of Carceral "Big Government"............................................1516. The Prison as Surrogate Ghetto: Encaging Black Subproletarians.....................1957. Moralism and Punitive Panopticism: Hunting Down Sex Offenders......................2098. The Scholarly Myths of the New Law-and-Order Reason................................2439. Carceral Aberration Comes to France................................................270Theoretical Coda: A Sketch of the Neoliberal State....................................287Acknowledgments.......................................................................315Notes.................................................................................319Index.................................................................................367

Chapter One

Comparative analysis of the evolution of penality in the advanced countries over the past decade reveals a close link between the ascendancy of neoliberalism, as ideological project and governmental practice mandating submission to the "free market" and the celebration of "individual responsibility" in all realms,* on the one hand, and the deployment of punitive and proactive law-enforcement policies targeting street delinquency and the categories trapped in the margins and cracks of the new economic and moral order coming into being under the conjoint empire of financialized capital and flexible wage labor, on the other hand.

Beyond their national inflections and institutional variations, these policies sport six common features. First, they purport to put an end to the "era of leniency" and to attack head-on the problem of crime, as well as urban disorders and the public nuisances that border the confines of penal law, baptized "incivilities," while openly disregarding their causes. To do so, they claim to rely on the recovered or renewed capacity of the state to bend so-called problem populations and territories to the common norm. Whence, second, a proliferation of laws and an insatiable craving for bureaucratic innovations and technological gadgets: crime-watch groups and "guarantors of place"; partnerships between the police and other public services (schools, hospitals, social workers, the national tax office, etc.); video surveillance cameras and computerized mapping of offenses; compulsory drug testing, "Tazers" and "flash-ball" guns; fast-track judicial processing and the extension of the prerogatives of probation and parole officers; criminal profiling, satellite-aided electronic monitoring, and generalized genetic finger-printing; enlargement and technological modernization of carceral facilities; multiplication of specialized detention centers (for foreigners waiting to be expelled, recidivist minors, women and the sick, convicts serving community sentences, etc.).

Next, the need for these punitive policies is conveyed everywhere by an alarmist, even catastrophist discourse on "insecurity," animated with martial images and broadcast to saturation by the commercial media, the major political parties, and professionals in the enforcement of order-police officials, magistrates, legal scholars, experts and merchants in "urban safety" counseling and services-who vie to propose remedies as drastic as they are simplistic. Woven of amalgamation, approximation, and exaggeration, this discourse is amplified and ratified by the prefabricated productions of a certain magazine sociology that shamelessly lumps together schoolyard brawls, stairwell graffiti, and riots in derelict housing projects, in accordance with the demands of the new political common sense.

Fourthly, out of a proclaimed concern for efficiency in the "war on crime" as much as for proof of solicitude toward this new figure of the deserving citizen that is the crime victim, this discourse overtly revalorizes repression and stigmatizes youths from declining working-class neighborhoods, the jobless, homeless, beggars, drug addicts and street prostitutes, and immigrants from the former colonies of the West and from the ruins of the Soviet empire, designated as the natural vectors of a pandemic of minor offenses that poison daily life and the progenitors of "urban violence" bordering on collective chaos. Following which, on the carceral front, the therapeutic philosophy of "rehabilitation" has been more or less supplanted by a managerialist approach centered on the cost-driven administration of carceral stocks and flows, paving the way for the privatization of correctional services. Lastly, the implementation of these new punitive policies has invariably resulted in an extension and tightening of the police dragnet, a hardening and speeding-up of judicial procedures, and, at the end of the penal chain, an incongruous increase in the population under lock, even though their impact on the incidence of offenses has never been established other than by pure proclamation, and without anyone raising the question of their financial burden, social costs, and civic implications.

These punitive policies are the object of an unprecedented political consensus and enjoy broad public support cutting across class lines, boosted by the tenacious blurring of crime, poverty, and immigration in the media as well as by the constant confusion between insecurity and the "feeling of insecurity." This confusion is tailor-made to channel toward the (dark-skinned) figure of the street delinquent the diffuse anxiety caused by a string of interrelated social changes: the dislocations of wage work, the crisis of the patriarchal family and the erosion of traditional relations of authority among sex and age categories, the decomposition of established working-class territories and the intensification of school competition as requirement for access to employment. And how would the rolling out of the penal arm of the state not be popular when the parties of the governmental Left in all of the postindustrial countries have converted to a narrowly behaviorist and moralistic Rightist vision that counterposes "individual responsibility" and "sociological excuses" in the name of the (electoral) "reality principle"? It follows that penal severity is now presented virtually everywhere and by everyone as a healthy necessity, a vital reflex of self-defense by a social body threatened by the gangrene of criminality, no matter how petty. Caught in the vise of the biased alternative between catastrophic and angelic visions, anyone who dares to question the self-evident commonplaces of the pense unique (one-way thinking) about "insecurity" that now rules uncontested is irrevocably (dis)qualified as a vain dreamer or an ideologue guilty of ignoring the harsh realities of contemporary...