Denouncing the penal state
| Author | David Nelken |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895810382382 |
| Published date | 01 November 2010 |
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Denouncing the penal state
David Nelken
Universities of Macerata, Italy, and Cardiff, UK
Whilst teaching law in Edinburgh in the late 1970s, I found myself on the outer edge of
a group of Labour party academic activists. (This was at a time when Gordon Brown,
Alistair Darling, and Robin Cook were all Edinburgh-based.) The problem we were
asked to address was how to rethink the welfare state so as to reduce welfare dependency.
I was not particularly enthused by this challenge, and so chose instead to make a contri-
bution as a lay panel member in the welfare-oriented Scottish juvenile justice system. It
is, therefore, with special interest that I read Wacquant’s brilliant investigations, in his
books Prisons of Poverty (2009a) and Punishing the Poor (2009b), into the relationship
between welfare and penality, and the role of think-tanks in spreading a new orthodoxy
about punishment and the prison in particular.
Wacquant shows us beyond doubt that, in the USA, the scaling down of welfare
support provided by the state went together with a more severe response to offending and
a rapid expansion in the use of the prison. He also demonstrates that there has been a
sustained effort to export both ideas elsewhere. Wacquant’s books display considerable
theoretical acumen: he stresses the need to draw both on Durkheim and Marx so as to
encompass the expressive and instrumental aspects of penality, and, if a little less persua-
sively, the value of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘bureaucratic field’ as a corrective to the overly
mechanical and functionalist approaches to how the restructuring of the neoliberal state
led to increasing punishment. But above all, the argument is carried along by massive
empirical detail, including illustrations from Wacquant’s own first-hand investigations of
prison conditions and his involvement in public debates over punishment. Both books
include a variety of striking and original insights, some connected to his contributions to
urban and race sociology as with his challenging claims about the functional equivalency
of slavery, ‘Jim Crow’ laws, the urban ghetto, and now the prison.
Wacquant’s comprehensive analysis proves, once again, not only that punishment is
about more than crime, but also that criminology is too important to be left to criminolo-
gists. Wacquant’s central argument is that rising punitiveness must be treated as a
response to social rather than criminal insecurity. In the USA, this resulted principally
from increased global competition and the rise in costs of raw materials, the end of
Fordist methods of production, and the reaction against the equal rights revolution. The
Corresponding author:
David Nelken
Email: sen4144@gmail.com
Criminology & Criminal Justice
10(4) 331–340
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895810382382
crj.sagepub.com
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