Title
Punishing the poor [electronic resource] : the neoliberal government of social insecurity / Loïc Wacquant.
Uniform Title
Punir les pauvres. English
ISBN
9780822392255 (electronic bk.)
0822392259
9780822344049
0822344041
9780822344223 (pbk.)
082234422X (pbk.)
Imprint
Durham [NC] : Duke University Press, 2009.
Language
English
Language Note
Translated from the French.
Description
1 online resource (xxiii, 384 p.) : ill.
Call Number
HV9471 .W3313 2009
Summary
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.
Note
"A John Hope Franklin Center book."
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description
Description based on print version record.
Series
Politics, history, and culture.
Prologue : America as living laboratory for the neoliberal future
Social insecurity and the punitive upsurge
The criminalization of poverty in the post civil rights era
Welfare "reform" as poor discipline and statecraft
The great confinement of the fin de siåcle
The coming of carceral "big government"
The prison as surrogate ghetto : encaging the black subproletarians
Moralism and punitive panopticism : hunting down sex offenders
The scholarly myths of the new law-and-order reason
Carceral aberration comes to French
Theoretical coda : a sketch of the neoliberal state.
