Class and criminal justice in neoliberal times: Wacquant dissects the penal state
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474511401510 |
| Author | Ron Levi |
| Subject Matter | Review Essays |
Punishment & Society
13(4) 480–488
!The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474511401510
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Review Essay
Class and criminal justice in
neoliberal times: Wacquant
dissects the penal state
Loı¨c Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (expanded edn), University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis,
MN: 2009; 232 pp.: 0816639019 (pbk)
Loı¨c Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke University
Press: Durham, NC, 2009; 408 pp.: 082234422X (pbk)
In his duology on criminal justice, neoliberalism, and state power, Loı
¨c Wacquant
successfully sets the stage for a reinvigorated sociology of the state, focusing on his
claim that social welfare and penal policy cannot be understood in isolation from
each other. To be sure, criminologists have for some time been producing a soci-
ology of the state – one thinks of Cohen’s (1985) Visions of Social Control,
Garland’s (2001) Culture of Control, or Simon’s (2007) Governing through Crime –
but Wacquant’s duology identifies the conjoined reorientation of social welfare
and penal policy as a core element of statecraft itself. In contrast, in Sociology
departments one often finds that the areas of ‘political sociology’ or ‘compara-
tive-historical sociology’ are purified of the criminal justice operations of the
State. How crime and punishment were kept at the periphery of these areas
calls for a Bourdieusian field analysis, but it is an untenable divide after
Wacquant’s magisterial books.
In Prisons of Poverty, Wacquant tracks the trajectory of US criminal justice
policies internationally. We follow the transformation of European state policies
through the networks of US-based think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute,
and imported across the Atlantic by actors profiting from the international capital
of drawing in ideas formed in the USA and adapted for local circumstance; the
converging political, economic, and ideological currents implicated in the hobbling
of the US social welfare state with the conjoined expansion of incarceration and
criminal justice supervision, both directed at the lowest end of the labour market;
the disconnect between the trend-lines of penalization and the incidence of crime
itself; the role of the trope of individual responsibility in the retrenchment of social
welfare and the expansion of penalization; the spectacular incarceration of for-
eigners and immigrants across European states; the very making of Europe
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