Prisons of Poverty
An international best seller dissects the globalization of penal policies “made in U.S.A.” as part of the spread of neoliberalism
232 Pages, 5 x 9 in
- Paperback
- 9780816639014
- Published: December 31, 2009
- Series: Contradictions of Modernity
Details
Prisons of Poverty
Series: Contradictions of Modernity
ISBN: 9780816639014
Publication date: December 31st, 2009
232 Pages
8 x 5
In Prisons of Poverty, Loïc Wacquant tracks the incubation and internationalization of the slogans, theories, and measures composing this new punitive “common sense,” fashioned to curb mounting urban inequality and marginality in the metropolis. He finds that a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks (led by the Manhattan Institute) forged them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, to criminalize poverty. He traces their import and export through the agency of the media and the pro-market policy institutes that have mushroomed across the European Union, particularly in Tony Blair’s Britain. And he shows how local academics helped smuggle U.S. techniques of penalization into their countries by dressing them up in scholarly garb.
Now available in English for the first time in an expanded edition, Prisons of Poverty reveals how the Washington consensus on economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment was extended to encompass punitive crime control because the invisible hand of the market necessitates and calls forth the iron fist of the penal state.
Loïc Wacquant is professor of sociology at the University of California–Berkeley and researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne in Paris.