Prisons of Poverty

by Loïc Wacquant

Overview

An international best seller dissects the globalization of penal policies “made in U.S.A.” as part of the spread of neoliberalism

In the early 1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani launched a zero-tolerance campaign aimed at street disorders and petty offenders, incarnated in the infamous “squeegee man.” New York City soon became a planetary showcase for an aggressive approach to law enforcement that, despite its extravagant costs and the absence of connection to the crime drop, came to be admired and imitated by other cities in the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America.

In Prisons of Poverty, Loïc Wacquant tracks the incubation and internationalization of the slogans, theories, and measures composing this new punitive “common sense,” fashioned to curb mounting urban inequality and marginality in the metropolis. He finds that a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks (led by the Manhattan Institute) forged them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, to criminalize poverty. He traces their import and export through the agency of the media and the pro-market policy institutes that have mushroomed across the European Union, particularly in Tony Blair’s Britain. And he shows how academics helped smuggle U.S. techniques of penalization into their countries by dressing them up in scholarly garb.

Now available in English for the first time in an expanded edition, Prisons of Poverty reveals how the Washington consensus on economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment was extended to encompass punitive crime control because the invisible hand of the market necessitates and calls forth the iron fist of the penal state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816639014
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	12/31/2009
Series:	Contradictions of Modernity , #23
Edition description:	Expanded
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Loïc Wacquant is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Return of the Prison 1

1 How America Exports Its Penal Common Sense 7

Manhattan, Crucible of the New Penal Reason 10

The Globalization of "Zero Tolerance" 19

London, Trading Post and Acclimation Chamber 27

Importers and Collaborators 39

The Academic Pidgin of Neoliberal Penality 47

2 From Social State to Penal State: American Realities, European Possibilities 55

Penal Policy as Social Policy: Imprisoning America's Poor 58

Precarious Workers, Foreigners, Addicts: The Preferred "Clients" of European Prisons 87

Discipline and Punish at the Fin de Sieècle: Toward Social Panopticism 103

After Monetary Europe, Police and Penitentiary Europe? 121

3 The Great Penal Leap Backward: Incarceration in America from Nixon to Clinton 133

The Great American Carceral Boom 135

A Correctional Marshall Plan 139

The Crime-Incarceration Disconnect 144

The Demise of Rehabilitation and the Politicization of Crime 150

The Color of Punitiveness 155

Afterword: A Civic Sociology of Neoliberal Penality 161

Notes 177

Index 209