
eBook - PDF
Punishing the Poor
The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
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- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
Punishing the Poor
The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
About this book
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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Yes, you can access Punishing the Poor by Loïc Wacquant,Loïc Wacquant, George Steinmetz in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Criminology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
Duke University Press BooksYear
2009Print ISBN
9780822344223, 9780822344049eBook ISBN
9780822392255Table of contents
- Contents
- Tables and Figures
- Prologue: America as Living Laboratory of the Neoliberal Future
- 1. Social Insecurity and the Punitive Upsurge
- Part 1: Poverty of the Social State
- Part II: Grandeur of the Penal State
- Part III: Privileged Targets
- Part IV: European Declinations
- Theoretical Coda: A Sketch of the Neoliberal State
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index