Neoliberalism as a criminological subject
| Author | David Brown |
| Published date | 01 April 2011 |
| Date | 01 April 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865810393097 |
| Subject Matter | Review Essays |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
44(1) 129–142
!The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865810393097
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Review Essay
Neoliberalism as a
criminological subject
David Brown
University of New South Wales, Australia
Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity,
Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2009, 408 pp.: 9780822344049, $89.95
(hbk), 9780822344223, $24.95 (pbk)
Introduction
There is a growing literature around the causes and effects of escalating imprisonment
rates across a number of Western countries over the last three decades, roughly from the
1980s onwards. This literature traverses a number of linked questions:
.Is this ‘penal surge’, as Wacquant calls it, in fact occurring across a large number of
countries or is it a form of American exceptionalism?
.If it is occurring, is it uniform or variable, indeed variable even within US States?
.What are its causes and effects?
.To the extent that it is occurring widely, how much is this due to processes of policy
transfer from the US to other countries?
.How can it be combated?
Loic Wacquant’s Punishing The Poor makes a major contribution to the literature
around these questions. It is a passionate, highly political and polemical contribution
which will shake up the field and take its place among the leading accounts alongside the
existing ‘classics’ such as Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001a), Simon’s Governing
Through Crime (2007) and Young’s The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007). It is likely to
be seized upon by activists and researchers looking for a more politically charged
account of globalized penal developments than that offered by previous accounts
which have focused on economic, political, social, and particularly, cultural changes
in the conditions of life in ‘late modernity’ to explain rising punitiveness and imprison-
ment rates. The great strength of the book is the answers it provides to the question what
are the causes and effects of the ‘penal surge’. It is less successful in answering the other
questions above and will be criticized as being too sweeping and US-centred, paying
insufficient attention to countries (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Downes and Hansen,
Corresponding author:
David Brown, Law Faculty, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052 NSW, Australia
Email: D.Brown@unsw.edu.au
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