Punir les pauvres: Le nouveau gouvernement de l’insécurité sociale

Politics, History, and Culture

by Loïc Wacquant

Le tour résolument punitif pris par les politiques pénales lors de la dernière décennie ne relève pas du simple diptyque «crime et châtiment». Il annonce l’instauration d’un nouveau gouvernement de l’insécurité sociale visant à façonner les conduites des hommes et des femmes pris dans les turbulences de la dérégulation économique et de la reconversion de l’aide sociale en tremplin vers l’emploi précaire. Au sein de ce dispositif «libéral-paternaliste», la police et la prison retrouvent leur rôle d’origine : plier les populations indociles à l’ordre économique et moral émergent.

C’est aux États-Unis qu’a été inventée cette nouvelle politique de la précarité, dans le sillage de la réaction sociale et raciale aux mouvements progressistes des années 1960 qui sera le creuset de la révolution néolibérale. C’est pourquoi ce livre emmène le lecteur outre-Atlantique afin d’y fouiller les entrailles de cet État carcéral boulimique qui a surgi sur les ruines de l’État charitable et des grands ghettos noirs. Il démontre comment, à l’ère du travail éclaté et discontinu, la régulation des classes populaires ne passe plus par le seul bras, maternel et serviable, de l’État social mais implique aussi celui, viril et sévère, de l’État pénal.

Et pourquoi la lutte contre la délinquance de rue fait désormais pendant et écran à la nouvelle question sociale qu’est la généralisation du salariat d’insécurité et à son impact sur les espaces et les stratégies de vie du prolétariat urbain.
En découvrant les soubassements matériels et en démontant les ressorts de la « pensée unique sécuritaire » qui sévit aujourd’hui partout en Europe, et singulièrement en France, ce livre pointe les voies possibles d’une mobilisation civique visant à sortir du programme répressif qui conduit les élites politiques à se servir de la prison comme d’un aspirateur social chargé de faire disparaître les rebuts de la société de marché.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, History, Race, Philosophy

364 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 2004

About the author

Loïc Wacquant is a sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography.

Wacquant is currently a Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris. He has been a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, and has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

America's love of prisons is, by now, old news. With an incarcerated population of 2.3 million people (0.7% of the population) and government expenditures of nearly USD $80 billion a year to keep them there (as of 2017), the numbers alone are pretty terrifying. Yet, as set out in this harrowing sociological study of American prisonfare, these figures only barely begin to tell the story of the colossal social and political shifts that truly underlie their magnitude. And the story, set out simply, is this: having gutted - to the point of near terminal decline - the 'social functions' of the state (think welfare, public housing, health, education, and labor law), neoliberal statecraft has turned to the prison as an alternative strategy to instead simply warehouse and neutralise the very destitute populations it has largely abandoned.

In other words, why take care of your poor when you can simply... put them away? Such, at any rate, is the logic of the state traced here in this brutal social and political retelling, which, in charting the almost perfectly inverse relationship between welfare and prisonfare, aims to decisively explain the delirious expansion of American carceral field from the 1970s onward. To be clear then, while it's the prison that remains front and centre as the subject of the book, its true object is nonetheless the rise of the 'neoliberal state of insecurity', and the specific and axial role of the prison in enabling that rise. Hence the book's central thesis - pitched here as a update of Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's seminal Regulating the Poor - regarding the necessity of thinking the recent policy dynamics of both the prison and the welfare state as inseparably entwined, on pain of rendering them simply incomprehensible when treated in isolation.

As a sideways study of the neoliberal state, Punishing the Poor thus also deftly shows how for all its rhetoric of laissez-faire, the call for 'small government' - when examined in practice - only really applies to those at the at the top of the societal ladder; as for those dwelling at the bottom, never has the Leviathan flexed itself in so expansive and heavy-handed a manner. As Wacquant puts it, never has the 'grandeur of the penal state' shown itself more ostentatiously than it has in recent times, with the drive to regulate, discipline, and punish making itself felt all across the estate of the marginalised classes, in ever more intense and chillingly creative ways (as an aside, Wacquant is keen to distance himself from the work of Michel Foucault on this point, who, in his forecast of the decline of the prison as an institution of societal control, foresaw neither the explosive growth of penal practices, nor their being put to use for the sheer neutralisation of bodies as opposed to their function as a mechanism of discipline).

While I've so far focused on the many 'qualitative' stakes of Wacquant's book, it's worth emphasising that in truth, Punishing the Poor doubles a veritable handbook of statistics and numbers, thrown at the reader with almost overwhelming force; coupled too with the many vignettes of 'localised' case studies littered throughout each chapter, one is hard pressed to come away with anything but sheer agreement with the book's many conclusions (most of which are couched in a palpable pathos of glowing fury). And while it's also the case that much of the data here is, by now, somewhat dated (the book having been published in 2009), Wacquant's observation that the US has been - and remains - a 'living laboratory of the neoliberal revolution' means that the work here is nonetheless indispensable for understanding not just the world as it has been, but the world in its becoming. Depressing, but essential reading.

[Simon Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

POVERTY AND PUNISHMENT

Loic Wacquants dense and detailed book "Punishing the Poor" charts the changes in Public Welfare and Penal policies during the Neo-Liberal era. His critique is compelling: States have retreated from their responsibilities to the majority of the population in the economic sphere, turned welfare into machine for forcing workers into the ever growing precarious sector of the labour market, and dealt with those areas, classes and ethnicities who have suffered the most at the hands of the lack of stable employment opportunities and adequate social security with relentless and intruisive policing followed up with grotesque levels of incarceration.

The focus is primarily on the experience of the United States. Part 1 - "The Poverty of the Social State" details the welfare reforms of the post-civil rights era that culminated in the Clinton era "Workfare" act of 1996. With respect to the black population, as well as latinos, a strong case is made for regarding the changes to the labour market and welfare entitlements as functioning as a further stage of repression following slavery and the post-reconstruction "Jim Crow" era following the gains of the civil rights movements of the 1960's.

Part 2 - "Grandeur of the Penal State" charts the inexorable rise of incarceration during the Neoliberal era, the class and "race" dimensions of this immense (2,000,000+) penal obsession. Wacquant regards "workfare and prisonfare" as two sides of the same coin: workfare attacking the welfare of women to encourage them en masse to participate in a precarious labour market where they are no better off, and prisonfare as being the response to the troublesome lower class casualties of a Neoliberal economy that is not able, nor meant to, offer them employment or other prospects.

Part 3 - "Priviliged Targets" is divided into two distinct case studies, the first being "The Prison as Surrogate Ghetto" deals in further detail with black experience of the penal system; and "Moralism and Punitive Panopticism" engages with the subject of prison and sexual offenders in a refreshingly objective manner, charting the moral posturing of politicians and the media against a punitive regime that may well increase rates of recidivism, and arguing for a dispassionate, rigorously scientific re-look at the whole question of sexual offenders with a view to reducing rates of re-offending and providing the most effective protection of the public.

The final part "European Declinations" charts the growing European tendancy to follow the example of the United States. It begins with a comprehensive debunking of zero-tolerance policing in particular that of New Yorks Mayor Rudy Giuliani, before moving on to general European turn to a workfare and prisonfare state, with particular focus on the experience of Wacquants native France.

The biggest, but far from fatal, shortcoming of the book is the occasional descent into what might be regarded as academic jargon. The introduction is particularly guilty of this, but I would encourage readers to work their way through this as they will be rewarded with a fascinating and holistic account of the Neoliberal State and its relations (Penal and Welfare/Workfare) with those who have lost most during its seemingly inexorable rise. Well recommended.

[Du Vaughn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just read the prologue; should the book read as well as the prologue, I cannot imagine disliking this text. There is nothing funny about the carceral state, but Wacquant is wry and his writing lyrical. Excited to finish this one.

[gabrielle]

i can not focus on this book...at all...wah

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book in quick succession by this author I’ve read. The first one hasn’t been reviewed yet. It is a discussion of Bourdieu’s three part understanding of space – something quite different from Lefebvre’s one, which I quite like – and I’ll need to let that percolate for a little while longer, perhaps even read the book again. Anyway, I was worried this one would just be a repeat of the book of his on the underclass. And look, in some ways it is – but if you were to read one or the other, I would probably recommend this one.

He relates his thinking of prisons back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – I mean, for obvious reasons, both being about prisons. But I think I would have brought in Bauman’s idea of the new poor. The central idea of this is that in the 1970s there was a movement away from what Erving Goffman referred to as total institutions. This meant that mental institutions were seen as terrible places that really ought to be done away with. This more or less happened. Whether the mentally ill were all that much better off ‘in community’ when they have been given so few supports and so little community is an argument for another day – but the point was that total institutions, institutions where every aspect of your life is determined by someone else, or rather the institution itself, became repulsive to us. The expectation was that prisons would go the same way as mental institutions. That isn’t quite how it worked out – particularly not in the US, which now has the world’s largest proportion of its population imprisoned.

So, why? Some people say it is in response to a huge up-tick in crime. The problem is that crime rates have actually been falling across the developed world. Now, the obvious rejoinder to that is to say, see, putting people in prison works. Except, there isn’t any statistical connection at all between rates of imprisonment and rates of crime. The reason explained here in this book – and one Bauman discusses at length in his Consumerism and the New Poor – is that capitalism no longer views certain groups of society as what Marx referred to as the reserve army of the unemployed. That is, literally a group of people who form a section of the working class who are without work, but who can, at a moment’s notice, be brought into the workforce to replace uppity workers who have started to demand higher wages. This reserve army existed right up until about the 1990s – but then they became what Bauman calls ‘waste humans’ and Bourdieu calls ‘the precariat’. By waste humans, Bauman means that they have failed in their primary duty in society – that is, to be consumers. As failed consumers they have no real function in society. In the eighteenth century they would have been shipped off to Australia or one of the other colonies. But today the world is full, and so there is nowhere for them to be shipped off too. What to do with them? The answer has been to put them in prison.

The book explains that the law is applied much more harshly towards the precariat than to any other section of society. In the US, poverty is conveniently colour coded. And so, the people you need to put in prison are generally Black. Poverty and violence go together, and so there are generally easy reasons to be found to facilitate this warehousing of the poor. And when that doesn’t work, there is the war on drugs. As just about everyone knows, white and black Americans use illegal drugs in identical proportions of the populations. Not that you would know that from the rates at which whites and blacks are imprisoned. Again, this isn’t about crime, this is about warehousing the poor.

If it was about crime, then prisons would be places where criminals would be rehabilitated. And authorities don’t even pretend that is the case any longer. As someone says in this, if you want to avoid prison you need to be habilitated, before you end up in there – since there is no hope for you once you are marked with that particular stigma.

I’d never heard of this book before I read it. Then at the end he talks about how incredibly popular it became. This came as much of a shock to the author as it did to me reading it. As he says at one point, he was invited to so many talk shows and interviewed in so many newspapers that he believes the year or so after this book came out, there are more photos of him than there had been for the rest of his life.

You should read this book. It has given me yet another reason to hate Rudy Giuliani. But this isn’t just a book where the rest of the world can point and snicker at the US, as the author points out, the rest of the world has realised that the US was onto something when it started warehousing their poor in prisons and they are following along the same path. The author also points out that these are short-term solutions that will in fact produce much worse problems down the track – but if climate change has taught us anything, it is that capitalism is solely interested in short-term solutions to long-term problems, even if those short-term solutions make everything a million times worse.

[CTEP]

This month I read Punishing the Poor, a book by sociologist Loïc Wacquant. His work seeks to draw a connection between two parallel phenomena in the United States (and, increasingly, in Western Europe and Latin America): the growth of the carceral state and the shrinking of social welfare programs. Understood as co-occurring with a collapsed social safety net, Wacquant argues that an increasingly punitive police and prison system “heralds the establishment of a new government of social insecurity” [emphasis in original] (11). Under this political regime, those at the bottom of the American class structure are directed either toward precarious, poverty-level employment or toward warehousing within the prison system. Just as welfare programs adopt a “workfare” model, obligating recipients to seek or maintain paid employment, Wacquant shows how “prisonfare” responds to poverty and other social ills through increased policing, imprisonment, and state monitoring of the poor.



Incarceration and policing serve not just as a means of dealing with poverty, but also take on the symbolic function of re-enforcing the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. Those who are currently, or can be put on the path to, participating in the bottom rungs of the wage labor market are distinguished from those deemed incapable of reforming; paired with the withdrawal of welfare funds, the criminalization of the latter group discourages individuals from pursuing alternatives to formal employment. By stigmatizing and/or expelling from mainstream society a significant portion of the nation’s poor, punitive policies can gain support by responding to public fears of crime while also concealing the human impact of profit-focused economic restructuring.



Punishing the Poor presents a number of similar arguments to other works on the American penal system, describing how the explosion in police activity and the prison population has come on the tail of a failed “war on drugs” and other programs that have largely targeted poor people of color. Wacquant extends upon this well-trodden ground, however, to explain that the so-called “prison-industrial complex” is but one part of a larger restructuring of the role of our nation’s government. As labor precarity has come to define the economic situation of many in this country, the state’s response has been to withdraw its support and increase its punishment for those not participating in the workforce.



As I read this book, I appreciated how Wacquant tied together two forces that have impacted the lives of many of the people with whom I work: the welfare system and the criminal justice system. Though able to maintain levels of relative stability thanks to housing, food, and limited cash assistance, participants are aware of the fact that certain constraints and time limits are placed on such funding, and that employment is necessary to maintain a level of long-term financial well-being. At the same time, whether through police profiling or by arrest for drug- or poverty-related crimes, the carceral state has left few of my participants untouched. Punishing the Poor explains how the relationship between these various measures has worked to shape the lives of many in this country.

[Harris]

This is a deeply researched book on the nexus of class and state from 1996-2006. It is simultaneously a work on the phenomenon of mass incarceration, hyper inflated policing, and social retrenchment, as well as a treatise on neoliberalism.

Though I think the whole book is great, some peak moments are his refutation of the false dichotomy of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. He argues that while neoliberal policies create the cushy environment for the upper and middle classes, neoconservatism and its fear mongering serves the paternalistic function of governing the lower classes who are ravaged by the new mode of the state.

There's a lot of good stuff in here.

[Danielle Sklar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this, its a lot but important u know

[mohave · Rating 1 out of 5]

Without an analysis of capitalism and its disasters all of this is pointless, basically. The author doesn't talk about the causes of mass incarceration.

[Liam Philbin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waqcuant is very much a sociologist, but he keeps it generally grounded. He makes convincing arguments, many of which are novel to my eyes.

[Jorge Caballero · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Wacquant depicts the state as a diminished entity that has no real influence in the economic front and has been utterly subjugated by neoliberalism, he then depicts the penal system as one of the states’ core political institutions that, in tandem with welfare, imposes a double regulation of the poor in order to control the marginal populations generated by the rising inequality, and social insecurity promoted (in the authors’ view) by neoliberalism.

In this portrait prison serves three purposes:
(1)Disciplining the working class (into acceptance of precarious, unskilled sub-employment and poverty as their lot);
(2)Nullifying and warehousing its most troublesome exponents;
(3)Reaffirm the states’ authority within its new restricted domain.

He advocates for a more welfare leaning state and makes some strong and valid arguments for it, but… his analysis seems biased: He resorts to hyperbolae repeatedly and renders an exaggerated and oversimplified interpretation of neoliberalism’s flaws and unintended consequences; uses statistics in disparate ways, sometimes citing comparable data, some others comparing absolute numbers from USA to those of places with much smaller populations; going back and forth using “current dollars” or “19xx dollars”, etc.

To me, this lack of objectivity makes me question the validity of some of his data and conclusions and detracts from his otherwise notable study into this very essential sociological subject.

PS. The book could greatly benefit from a serious editing and synthesizing effort.

[UChicagoLaw]

Wacquant’s book is a wide-ranging treatment of our contemporary punishment practices that relocates the entire field within the broader historical and political context of the twentieth century ascendance of neoliberalism and the transformation and gradual evisceration of the welfare state. After reading his book, it seems no longer possible to think about the punishment field without addressing what Pierre Bourdieu famously referred to as “the Left hand of the state” or what Wacquant so eloquently describes as “the invisible hand of the deregulated labor market.” - Bernard Harcourt

[Nola Rankin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although not exactly a comfortable bedtime read, this is an interesting book which raises some excellent points. Why does society blame/punish people for being poor?

[acid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine staubtrockene lange detaillierte Schilderung wie es vom Welfare zum Workfare kam. Nicht der leichteste Stoff aber lohnt!

[Helena · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's all in the tittle. Depressingly good.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely educational. However the author is highly repetitive as whole 40 + paged chapters, easily could have been 20 pages.