Punishing the poor

by Loic Wacquant

The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive 'workfare' and expansive 'prisonfare' under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures - the teenage 'welfare mother, ' the ghetto 'street thug, ' and the roaming 'sex predator' - and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welf