Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His work includes the trilogy Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008); Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009); and, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (2011). (Click here to buy those books; an excellent overview of his life and work is here.) In the column, the title of which is the title of the post, he asks:
How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path toward extinction? In my book Punishing the Poor, I make three arguments to resolve this historical conundrum. First, the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity caused by the casualisation of wage labor and the disruption of ethno-racial hierarchy. Second, we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. Third, the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prison fare” partake of the forging of the neoliberal state.
My first thesis is that the ramping up of the penal wing of the state is a response to social insecurity, and not a reaction to crime trends.... Consider this simple statistic: the US held 21 prisoners for every 10,000 “index crimes” in 1975; thirty years later, it locked up 125 prisoners for every 10,000 crimes. This means that the country has become six times more punitive, holding crime constant.... the resurging prison has come to serve three missions that have little to do with crime control: to bend the fractions of the post-industrial working class to precarious wage-work; to warehouse their most disruptive or superfluous elements; and to patrol the boundaries of the deserving citizenry while reasserting the authority of the state in the restricted domain it now assigns itself.
My second thesis is that we must re-link shifts in penal and social policy, instead of isolating them from one another. The downsizing of public aid, complemented by the shift from the right to welfare to obligation of workfare (that is, forced participation in sub par employment as a condition of support), and the upsizing of the prison are the two sides of the same coin. Together, workfare and prisonfare effect the double regulation of poverty in the age of deepening economic inequality and diffusing social insecurity....They are guided by the same philosophy of moral behaviourism and employ the same techniques of control, including stigma, surveillance, punitive restrictions, and graduated sanctions to “correct” the conduct of their clients.
My third thesis is that the meshing of workfare and prisonfare partakes of the making of the neoliberal state. Economists have propounded a conception of neoliberalism that equates it with the rule of the “free market” and the coming of “small government” and, by and large, other social scientists have adopted that conception. The problem is that it captures the ideology of neoliberalism, not its reality. The comparative sociology of actually existing neoliberalism reveals that it involves everywhere the building of a erection of a Centaur-state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom. The neoliberal Leviathan practices laissez faire et laissez passer toward corporations and the upper class, at the level of the causes of inequality. But it is fiercely interventionist and authoritarian when it comes to dealing with the destructive consequences of economic deregulation for those at the lower end of the class and status spectrum.
From this interview Wacquant provides a welcome putting-into-perspective of the question of prison labor:
Take a specific example: in the United States, militants for criminal justice are strongly mobilized against the privatization of prisons and what the thesis of the “prison-industrial complex”portrays as the exploitation of the captive labor force of prisoners. In reality, carceral employment by private firms involves barely 0.3% of inmates: it is an absolutely miniscule phenomenon. To battle to abolish “slave labor” in prison is to fight a chimera.
Even if for-profit prisons were closed down overnight in the United States, the confined population would remain unchanged: the authorities would simply stow it with 6% fewer cells. By focusing obsessively on privatization, you miss the core of the problem: it is not the search for capitalist profit that drives the stupendous expansion of the population behind bars in the US but the construction of a liberal-paternalist state, that is, a political project which requires that we bring economic deregulation, the restriction of social assistance and the expansion of the penal sector into a single framework for analysis and action... Criminal insecurity is only a decoy which diverts the collective gaze away from the real stake, which is the redrawing of the perimeter and missions of the state as it faces the Moloch of the market.
This is of course a superb analysis by a real expert; I would only say that I use "prison-industrial complex" in a colloquial way to indicate not so much the single issue of prison labor but the total political issue of the penal system, just as "military-industrial complex" is not simply focused on the amount of money, immense that it is, that is funnelled to contractors each year, but indicates the overall issue of the militarization of society.
Recent Comments