The Wedding of Workfare and Prisonfare Revisited

Abstract

Volker Eick (VE): Your book Punishing Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity is second volume in trilogy that unravels what you call the tangled triangular connections between class restructuring, ethnoracial division and state crafting in era of neoliberal ascendancy (Wacquant, 2009a: 315). Can you situate it in this broader problematic linking marginalia, welfare policy, and punishment? Loic Wacquant (LW): Think of triangle with two-way relationship between class and race forming base and state providing top. The first book, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Wacquant, 2008), explores base: it takes up class/race nexus in dualizing metropolis through comparison of sudden collapse of black American ghetto with slow disintegration of working-class territories in Western European city after deindustrialization. I make three main arguments: I disprove fashionable thesis of transatlantic convergence of districts of dispossession on model of dark ghetto; I trace making of African-American hyperghetto and of anti-ghettos of Europe in post-Fordist age to shifts in public policy, arguing that both formations are economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined; and I diagnose onset of new regime of marginality fueled by fragmentation of wage labor, curtailment of social state, and territorial stigmatization. The next two books mine two sides of that triangle. Punishing Poor takes up class/state nexus on both social and penal fronts. It charts how public officials have responded to this emerging marginality through punitive containment. It also reveals that new politics and policy of poverty coupling disciplinary workfare and neutralizing prison, invented in America over past three decades, partake of crafting of neoliberal state, properly reconceptualized. The third volume, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and Rise of Penal State (Wacquant, in press), dissects race/state nexus: it shows how ethnoracial division intensifies class decomposition at bottom, facilitates shift to workfare, and escalates rolling out of penal state; and, conversely, how penalization refurbishes meaning and workings of race. It sketches historical and theoretical model of meshing of bare hyperghetto, in which lower-class blacks become trapped after 1960s, with overgrown prison in America; it moves across Atlantic to cover overincarceration of postcolonial immigrants in European Union; and it concludes by plumbing militarization of marginality in Brazilian metropolis as revelator of deep logic of penalization. A central argument is that prison and race are tied together by permutations of dishonor. A fourth book, Prisons of Poverty, which I first wrote decade ago as an exercise in civic sociology (Wacquant, 2009b), tracks international travels and travails of zero tolerance policing and other made-in-the-USA penal notions and nostrums (the broken-windows theory, youth curfews, mandatory minimum sentences, plea bargaining, etc.), as part of worldwide spread of neoliberalism. I demonstrate how Washington consensus on economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment was extended to punitive crime control through agency of think tanks, politicians seduced by new religion of market, new globetrotting breed of consultants in urban security, and local academics eager to smuggle U.S. techniques of penalization into their countries by dressing them up in scholarly garb. Karen J. Winkler (KJW): You write in Punishing Poor that public agitation over law and order has ramped up over past quarter century in United States and is now spreading to Europe. Why did it come up first in America? LW: In three decades after peaking of Civil Rights Movement, United States went from being leader in progressive justice poised to show humanity way to a nation without prisons--to recall title of book by U. …

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