Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity - Brossura

Wacquant, Loic

Brossura

ISBN 10: 082234422X ISBN 13: 9780822344223

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2009

Riassunto

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 welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship.

Visit the author’s website.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"This powerful book shows that America's harsh penal policies are of a piece with harsh social policies and that both can be understood as a symbolic and material apparatus to control the marginal populations created by neoliberal globalization. A tour de force!" --Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare

"Boldly conceived and carefully constructed the book details the grandeur of a penal state resourced by the plundering of the social one and dissects the attitudes that legitimate it in all its grandeur. Moreover, Wacquant not only chronicles the enthronement of the penal state in the US but also its imitative climb towards ascendancy in Western Europe...The cityscape he surveys is as ruptured and ill-lit as an urban earthquake, but his gaze is clear and steady...Urgent and timely, absorbing and alarming, Punishing the Poor should warn us that Britain's increasing dependence on our penal state and the accelerating erosion of our social state are one and the same thing, and may prove a disaster." --TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION BOOK OF THE WEEK Louise Hardwick, Times Higher Education, 6th August 2009

L'autore:

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris. He is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and recipient of the 2008 Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association. His recent books include Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality, Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer, and Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. He is a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Ethnography.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 082234422X
• ISBN 13: 9780822344223
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 384