In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.
Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper penality" and "street penality."
Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.
- 510 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Rethinking the Penal State
About this book
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introductory
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- About the Cover Image
- A Genealogical Sketch
- Overture: On Punishment, the State and Citizenship
- 1. Penality as Core State Capacity and Negative Sociodicy
- 2. Marginality, Ethnicity, Territory
- 3. Penal Power Incarnate: A Day in the Life of a Prosecutor
- Coda: The Parable of Marx’s Hangman and the Aporias of Abolitionism
- Acknowledgments
- References
- Index of Names
- Index of Notions
- End User License Agreement
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Yes, you can access Rethinking the Penal State by Loïc Wacquant in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Criminology. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.