Book review: Resist the Punitive State – Grassroots Struggles Across Welfare and, Housing, Education and Prisons, by Emily Luise Hart, J Greener and R Moth (eds)
| Author | Nicola Ceesay |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895820983673 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2021, Vol. 21(4) 1 –3
© The Author(s) 2021
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Book review
LE Hart, J Greener and R Moth (eds), Resist the Punitive State – Grassroots Struggles Across
Welfare and, Housing, Education and Prisons, Pluto Press: London, 2020; 288 pp.: £75.00 (hbk),
£18.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Nicola Ceesay, University of Glasgow, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1748895820983673
Resist the Punitive State is an unapologetically radical text which explores in captivating
detail a range of examples of grassroots resistance to the harms caused by neoliberal
politics and policies. The authors set the parameters of the book by posing the following
question; What do we do when housing, mental health, disability, prisons and immigra-
tion policy become synonymous with state violence? Through a series of carefully artic-
ulated chapters, this work conceptually interrogates the role of the State in meting out
such harms and the theoretical frameworks and strategies employed by oppositional
movements. In doing this, it makes a valuable contribution across many arenas including
critical social policy and criminal justice.
Perhaps one of the main strengths of this work is the introductory chapter which
grounds the book within an analysis and critique of the capitalist state. Through this, it
contextually embeds the emergence of neoliberalism as both political ideology and as
statecraft offering a theoretical lens with which to understand the struggles that feature
in this work. The end of the Fordist-Keynesian era meant political and economic changes
which reorganised the State along neoliberal lines. With this, there has been a concerted
and sustained attack on welfare provision and the rights of workers resulting in increased
precarity in the spheres of production and a worsening of overall material conditions. As
a consequence, we have seen the re-deployment of the Right arm of the State to manage
ensuant problems at the bottom of social space through repressive welfare policies and
the criminal justice apparatus (Cooper and Whyte, 2017). It is argued that the Beveridgian
model of welfare has given way to arbitrary, coercive and stigmatising practices denoting
a ‘punitive turn’ across many areas of service delivery.
Yet optimistically, the punitive turn has met with widespread contestation in the form
of broad social movements and local activism. Using the example of housing, the book
highlights how its structural reordering in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has con-
tributed to social cleansing by uprooting working-class communities through mecha-
nisms of gentrification and regeneration on one hand and disinvestment and privatisation
983673CRJ0010.1177/1748895820983673Criminology & Criminal JusticeBook review
book-review2021
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