Customer Reviews

Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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This should be essential reading for anyone interested in what 'welfare reform' really means: as Wacquant shows, it doesn't mean creating a better deal for the needy, it means extinguishing both the right and the expectation that the needy will get help from the government. Wacquant argues that the so-called 'war on crime' in the US is nothing other than a war on the poor with the aim of making them less visible. The irony is that it is costing government more to incarcerate the poor than it would to put them on welfare. So what has to be explained is why government would should the more expensive and obviously far less humane option. Given that the UK an Europe seem anxious to follow the same path as the US on this subject, Wacquant's claim that his research has a prophetic value is justified. This book is part of a trilogy and is obviously the product of a long and obsessive amount of research that has left no stone unturned.

'Punishing the Poor' is the second part of a Trilogy beginning with 'Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality' and ending with 'Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State'.
In Punishing the Poor Wacquant elucidates the connection between Prison and Welfare. Both of these institutions serve the same demographics with the same purposes. According to Wacquant the rise in prison populations are in proportion to the dismantling of welfare and the deindustrialization of the urban core. Incarceration serves the function of removing undesirables from view while extending state surveillance and control beyond the prison itself through parole, probation and welfare. Welfare 'Queens' and 'Dangerous' criminals serve the function of displaced anger while the state proceeds with it's neoliberalism program of retrenchment.
There is a lot going on in this book which required a careful reading by me. Very thought provoking!