Les Prisons de la misère - Nouvelle édition

by Loïc Wacquant

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 local 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.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, Social Science, Academic, Race, France

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

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

[Mae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Globalement très bon, seulement peu convaincu par la thèse du "projet politique" de Nixon et Reagan en opposition au Prison Industrial Complex que défend Davis

[JP Beaty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the application of neoliberalism to mass incarceration and the culture of control was conceptually interesting. I found the whole intellectual history approach to be dull and foregrounded some of the least interesting aspects of the penal turn. I think the networks of right wing think tanks and politicians exporting the intellectual background for mass incarceration was somewhat interesting idea but the analysis never really tied it to stories, data, or even popular culture. What left is a somewhat underwhelming exercise in excavating the somewhat obvious origins of our common sense around crime.

[CACC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buenísimo libro para todos aquellos subnormales que se creen que Bukele es un Mesías de la política

[Serge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loic Wacquant offers a model of America’s transition from the social state to the penal state along five dimensions in his book Prisons of Poverty. Wacquant sees a connection between (1) the runaway rise of inmate populations at all levels of the custodial system to (2) enlarged probation, punitive parole, and the growth of electronic and genetic databases allowing for intensified surveillance at a distance to (3) the disproportionate increase of correctional budgets and personnel to (4) the resurgence and frenetic development of a private industry of imprisonment to (5) racial disparity in sentencing (Prisons of Poverty, 3) Wacquant notes that “as a result of the new synergy between the “capture” and observation” functions of the penal apparatus, there now exist some 55 million criminal files (compared to 35 million a decade ago) on approximately 30 million individuals, corresponding to almost one-third of the country’s adult male population.” (Prisoners of Poverty, 65)
As Wacquant subtly notes, criminal punishment has come to be driven by extrajudicial purposes and interests in the wake of the televised urban revolts of the 1960s. Political and mass media uses of criminality pervert our understanding of “law and order”. The coopting of this phrase as an electoral leitmotif was a euphemism according to Wacquant for the rejection of black demands for integration and the consolidation of white flight from the urban centers (and their abandonment of public institutions) (Prisons of Poverty, 153).

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting account of the rise of the U.S. penal state and its global diffusion. wacquant's thesis diverges a bit from the typical "prison-industrial complex" framework; instead of attributing mass incarceration primarily to economic motivations, he traces it back to social and political decisions. his trajectory goes something like this: breakdown of the fordist-keynesian compact / atrophy of the welfare state --> public "disorder" left by this absence --> creation of the penal state. i think i generally agree with him, but i also don't think this necessarily discounts the PIC narrative. they could very well operate simultaneously & symbiotically. global component is useful and important (although, for research purposes, i only skimmed it). most scholarship on mass incarceration tends to focus on the states – wacquant notes this curious gap and explains how the U.S.'s penal common sense has been exported to western europe.

[Carlos Eduardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ótimo livro pra entender o sistema carcerário implementado nesse contexto neoliberal e reconhecer o que essas realmente as prisões são

[Rallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a fellow anthropologist studying prisons and the penal apparatus, I very much appreciate Wacquant's work. That said, I actually enjoyed this book more than Punishing the Poor. Although the latter is a very good book, this book manages to very succinctly demonstrate evidence for his claims. One does not need to be a scholar of anthropology or the carceral system in order to learn from, and enjoy, this book.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although written in the late 1990s, this book is sadly still applicable today. It traces the explosion of American prisons post 1970 and the expansion of American carceral ideas around the world.