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51 How. J. Crim. Just. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/hjcj51 and id is 1 raw text is: The Howard Journal Vol 51 No 1. February 2012 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2311.2011.00686.x ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 1-15 'The Prison is an Outlaw Institution' LOIC WACQUANT Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Researcher, Centre europeen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris Abstract: This discussion of Les Prisons de la misbre (Raisons d'agir Editions, Paris, 1999 - expanded and updated English-language edition, Prisons of Poverty, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009) responds to queries put forth by the editors of R de rdel and originally published in French in that journal in June 2000 (vol. 3, pp.33-8). It argues that the carceral boom in the United States results from the penalisation of poverty correlative of the simultaneous revamping of the economic, welfare and justice missions of the state. Pro-market think tanks have played a driving role in fashioning and dijfusing America's 'punitive common sense' across the Atlantic, thus accelerating the import of aggressive crime rhetorics and policies in Western Europe by political elites (including Left governments) seduced by neoliberal ideology. But, while the prison purports to enforce the law and to curtail the disorders generated by economic deregulation, the recent French experience confirms that its very organisation and daily operation make it an outlaw institution. It is promoted as a remedy for criminal insecurity and urban marginality, but it only serves to concentrate and intensify both, even as it makes them temporarily invisible. To get out of the policy and civic impasse into which the penalisation of poverty leads contemporary societies, we must raise anew the quintessen- tially political question of the purpose(lessness) of incarceration at centurys dawn. Keywords: incarceration; zero tolerance policing; penal philosophy; penal state; urban marginality; think tanks; neoliberalism In Prisons of Poverty (Wacquant 2009a), you argue that there is a close link between the rise of neoliberalism and the bolstering of law-and-order policies, first in the United States and later in Europe. You encapsulate this development in a succinct formula: 'Withering away of the economic state, diminution and denigration of the social state, expansion and glorificaton of the penal state' (p.8). Can you unpack that expression? The intent of this formula is to stress that we cannot understand policing and prison policies in advanced societies today unless we place them in the framework of a broader transformation of the state, a transformation that is itself linked to a makeover of wage work and a shift in the balance of power between the classes and assorted groups struggling over its control. In this struggle, transnational corporations and the 'modernising' fractions of the bourgeoisie and state nobility have formed an alliance under the banner of 1 C 2011 The Author The Howard Journal of Criminaljustice C) 2011 The HowardLeague and Blackwell Publishing Ltd Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ UK

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