What’s neoliberalism got to do with it? Towards a political economy of punishment in Greece
| Author | Sappho Xenakis,Leonidas K. Cheliotis |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895810382718 |
| Published date | 01 November 2010 |
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
What’s neoliberalism got
to do with it? Towards
a political economy of
punishment in Greece
Leonidas K. Cheliotis
Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Sappho Xenakis
Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy, Greece
Over the last fifteen years or so, Loïc Wacquant has not merely helped lay the epistemo-
logical foundations for interrogating the relationship between neoliberalism and penality,
nor has he confined himself to the empirical scrutiny of various and varying jurisdictions
with a view to ‘tracking the circulation of punitive discourses, norms, and policies elabo-
rated in the United States as constituent ingredients of the neoliberal government of social
inequality’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 172). Wacquant has also grown to become one of the most
vocal public critics of neoliberal penality internationally (see further Loader and Sparks,
this issue). Indeed, whilst travelling across the world in his capacity as a public intellec-
tual, Wacquant came to acknowledge that ‘the diffusion of neoliberal penality is not only
more advanced, but also more diversified and more complex than portrayed [in his
Prisons of Poverty]’. For example, ‘just as there are varieties of capitalism, there are
many paths down the road to market rule, and thus many possible routes to the penalisa-
tion of poverty’ (2009a: 175). Hence, ultimately, the ‘invitation’ to his readers around the
globe to take up and advance the study of penal policy and practice from a political
economy perspective (2009a: 176). The invitation arrives with no strings attached. To
paraphrase Wacquant’s own salute to Bourdieusian anti-dogmatism, an invitation to think
with Wacquant is of necessity an invitation to think beyond Wacquant, and against him
whenever required (Wacquant, 1992a: xiv).
Neoliberalism, according to Wacquant, is a ‘transnational political project aiming to
remake the nexus of market, state, and citizenship from above’. It is carried out by a ‘new
global ruling class in the making’, spanning the heads and senior executives of transna-
tional firms, high-ranking politicians, state managers and top officials of multinational
Corresponding author:
Leonidas K. Cheliotis
Email: l.cheliotis@qmul.ac.uk
Criminology & Criminal Justice
10(4) 353–373
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1748895810382718
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354 Criminology & Criminal Justice 10(4)
organisations (e.g. the IMF and the World Bank), as well as cultural–technical experts
in their employ (e.g. legal and media professionals) (Wacquant, 2009b: 306–7). Wacquant
elaborates that neoliberalism entails not only the reassertion of the dynamic of capitalist
production and market exchange, but the articulation of four institutional logics: economic
deregulation; the withdrawal of welfare protection; the cultural trope of individual respon-
sibility; and an evermore expansive penal apparatus. Rather, then, than being a deviation
from neoliberalism, penality is one of its essential components. More specifically, at the
same time as publicly repudiating intervention in economic and social matters to ensure
national competitiveness on the global stage, neoliberal states promote the ‘new “punitive
common sense” forged in the United States’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 162), which is to say that
they elevate criminal insecurity and punishment to the frontline of governmental priorities.
The underlying aim is to manage the social reverberations of ‘advanced social inse curity’
that neoliberal policies generate amongst the lower and middle classes. At the bottom
of the class structure, punishment works to contain the disorders caused by the ‘objective
insecurity’ of flexibilised wage labour and social-welfare retrenchment (2009a: 93).
Concurrently, punishing the poor creates a convenient outlet for the ‘subjective’ insecurity
experienced by the middle classes, ‘whose prospects for smooth reproduction or upward
mobility have dimmed as competition for valued social positions has intensified and the
state has reduced its provision of public goods’ (Wacquant, 2009b: 300). As such, punish-
ment of the nether regions of social space compensates for the deficit in legitimacy suf-
fered by state leaders on the economic and social fronts.
Our aim in this article is to put Wacquant’s neoliberal penality thesis to the test within
the Greek context. Of late, Greece has been the focus of considerable international atten-
tion, not simply in relation to the financial crisis there, but also in connection with issues
of law and order. Wacquant, for his part, includes Greece amongst the countries that have
joined the ‘“Washington consensus” on punishment’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 3). But whilst he
addresses the Greek case in broad-brush cross-country comparisons, he does not delve
into national historical complexities or other empirical details. This omission obscures
important insights both into Greece as such and, more generally, into the relationship
between neoliberalism and penality. Indeed, Greece readily lends itself to a critical eval-
uation of the degree to which penal policies incubated in America are globalised as part
of the dispersion of neoliberalism. On the one hand, Greece has shared the general inter-
national trend in rising punitiveness over recent years. On the other hand, as a post-
dictatorial society, it has known intense periods of punitiveness within living memory.
Furthermore, as a semi-peripheral country of the world economy, Greece has experi-
enced a different trajectory of capitalist development compared to core Western states.1
We begin by examining trends in punitiveness in Greece as expressed through indica-
tors of imprisonment (though, of course, one could follow Wacquant in exploring addi-
tional facets of the criminal justice system such as policing). Our method differs from
Wacquant’s in two important ways. First, rather than use one-day snapshot censuses
of the prison population, we draw on indicators that allow a fuller grasp of the use of
imprisonment: the annual caseload of offenders held in custody and the duration of
stay behind bars, as determined both by the length of sentence and the occurrence of
early release.2 And second, rather than restrict the analysis to ‘the past dozen years’ (by
which Wacquant (2009b: 88) means the period 1985–2000), we take a longer perspec-
tive. To locate the root causes of a given trend, it is necessary not only to trace its
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