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.
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