One evening in the prison where Cornell University runs an academic program, one of the men I had come to know was bent intently over lined paper drafting a proposal for submission to the superintendent. It was a request to organize a program on domestic violence. Within 20 minutes he had a perfectly composed two-page document. The words “personal responsibility” occurred once in the introduction (“this class will enhance our sense of personal responsibility”), twice in the body of the text, and once in the conclusion. “What if you were to cut back on the number of ‘personal responsibilities,’” I offered in jest, “and claim your right, instead, to organize a class of your own choosing?” He got the joke. No doubt the superintendent read the “personal responsibility” incantation with a to-be-expected grain of salt. Whether or not this kind of language is genuine (as it most certainly was in this case), it is today part and parcel of the prison catechism.
As Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram contend in Disciplining the Poor, these tropes of individualism and self-regulation, independence, and personal responsibility infuse the contemporary governance of the poor. In its focus on poverty governance, this landmark work resonates closely with its progenitor, Regulating the Poor, the now-classic text written 40 years ago by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. In the words of Soss, Fording, and Schram that might well echo those of Piven and Cloward, “Programs for the poor are used mainly to temper the hardships of poverty and ensure that they do not become disruptive for the broader society … The needs and disorders that arise in poor communities, and the difficulties they pose for societal institutions, must somehow be managed” (p. 1).
Poverty, however, must be managed differently, they argue, as the character of welfare changes. For all its continuities, the logic of welfare has shifted. In every country of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Michael Lipsky observes, “[w]elfare had earlier been basically grant-related where people were given a subvention for living.” Now the expectation is “work to get a job and contribute to society. It's been a sea change.”Footnote 1 With “work” as the template, the project of poverty governance has undergone significant discursive retrofitting. Whether new ideologies have shaped policy or policy change requires transmuted ideological justifications, the ways of welfare governance have been refashioned. “Deservingness,” “suitable homes,” and “morally acceptable behavior” (p. 236) are shunted aside to accommodate a new normative system that accentuates discipline, individual responsibility, self-sufficiency, and market logics.
Soss, Fording, and Schram's important thesis, then, is that two reform movements, neoliberalism and paternalism, have converged to frame the contemporary character of poverty governance. Neoliberalism turns society toward privatization and frames social problems as “matters of personal choice” (p. 23). Paternalism instructs the poor (as a father would his child) in the norms and behaviors of those whose success purportedly exemplifies autonomy, personal responsibility, and discipline. Although it bears noting (to editorialize) that American neoliberalism when operating globally ostensibly encourages aid agencies working with the poor to foster inclusion, opportunities, empowerment, participation, and capacity building,Footnote 2 neoliberalism at home, the authors rightly argue, constitutes an identity project that seeks, by means of harsh tutelage, to reincarnate the poor in the model of an industrious, responsible, self-reliant (and nondemanding) individual.
What, then, actually distinguishes Piven and Cloward's Reference Piven and Cloward1971Regulating the Poor from Soss, Fording, and Schram's 2011 Disciplining the Poor? To press the comparison further, how in turn does Loïc Wacquant's important 2009 publication Punishing the Poor Footnote 3 intersect with or diverge from the analysis of poverty governance in Disciplining the Poor? What work is done by the distinctive terminologies of regulation, discipline, and punishment?
Regulation versus Discipline
Soss, Fording, and Schram accede, with perhaps a bit too much alacrity, to the Piven and Cloward thesis about regulation. The central claim of Regulating the Poor is that social disorder together with labor-market needs cause the state to regulate the size of the welfare rolls. As the authors write (p. 295):
Our empirical findings provide the strongest evidence to date that the dynamics identified in Regulating the Poor (Reference Piven and Cloward1971) persist as vital elements of poverty governance today. Welfare programs for the poor continue to operate, as Piven and Cloward argue, as derivative institutions shaped by pressures that arise from the polity and market. Our evidence confirms that they continue to enforce work through the principle of less eligibility, pushing the poor into the least attractive jobs by keeping benefits low, making them inaccessible, and surrounding them with stigma.
I take their evidence (from Florida) as convincing that welfare rolls respond to local employment needs (pp. 197–99). More surprising, however, is what they leave unremarked. Protest and demonstrations, vital actors in the Piven and Cloward story of welfare regulation, are virtually absent from today's poverty politics and absent, too, from the index of Disciplining the Poor. In hindsight, then, does this book raise questions about the Piven and Cloward argument regarding regulation? If welfare caseloads in the United States still rise and fall in tune with the market needs of the local economy but in the absence of political organizing or demonstrations, does this situation warrant a reexamination of state regulation and the protest–welfare nexus that was one of the lynchpins of the Piven and Cloward narrative assigning agency to the poor but that seems less visible in the present account? Instead, is it the case that racialized and other social constructions of the poor, even in the absence of outright protest, now function to create fear of potential disorder that, like protest in the past, shape contemporary expansions and contractions of the welfare rolls? If so, is discipline (and the project of identity construction) now preempting the project of labor-market regulation?
This book, whose title has a Foucauldian intonation, is at its most powerful in tracing the operation of social constructions at multiple levels (federal, state, local, and individual) and in multiple institutional locales (the welfare and prison bureaucracies). Whether these involve neoliberal beliefs in the efficiency of the market and in individual responsibility or whether they are about implicit racial stereotyping, the authors demonstrate exhaustively how these constructions inform policies and social practices. Lax individual discipline (failing to show up for appointments, not attending classes, not keeping a job) or implicit negative associations linking racial stereotypes and behaviors inflect both welfare and penal experiences. In this discursive (or meaning-making) approach, the authors go beyond the more material account of Regulating the Poor to excellent effect. At the same time, however, prospective comparisons (that one might draw on outside the book) intimate how difficult it is to assess where neoliberal constructions leave off and racial stereotyping takes over. Immigrants, unauthorized or not (in contrast to “convicts” and “welfare queens”), are generally seen as prototypically diligent. But the high marks assigned immigrants on the neoliberal scale of work ethic and personal discipline have produced only weak protection in recent years against the heavy hand of state and public retribution.
A broad, overarching theory of neoliberal discipline is inevitably in some tension with the attempt to recognize variability. Commendably concerned as the authors are with avoiding an overly functionalist argument (pp. 7, 59), they seek to recognize the considerable differences in the institutionalization of neoliberalism and of racial constructions by analyzing the role of different institutional designs, of federalism, of partisan politics, and of racial constructs at the state and local levels. But this important accession to institutional variability paradoxically weakens the force of a more unitary idea of neoliberal discipline. As Nicola Lacey asks in a different context, how far can a single monolithic idea of neoliberalism go to explain variation in incarceration rates across the Anglo-Saxon and continental European world which records a prison population in the United States that is seven times the level of much of Europe?Footnote 4
Discipline versus Punishment
The focus of Soss, Fording, and Schram on discipline, then, usefully directs the analysis of poverty governance both towards and beyond material forces to a consideration of social constructs. But what is at stake in describing poverty governance more as a project of discipline than of punishment? By way of preface, it should be emphasized that both Soss, Fording, and Schram, on the one hand, and Wacquant, on the other, make vital intellectual contributions in bringing welfare and incarceration inquiries within the same analytical frame, even though these two institutions have generated very separate scholarly inquiries. Without my detailing the full range of theories that endeavor to link neoliberalism, the market, and the shifting character of welfare to the upsurge in incarceration,Footnote 5 it should be noted here that Wacquant and Soss, Fording, and Schram understand the relationship in different ways. For Wacquant, there is a causal bond between what he sees as neoliberalism's elimination of the welfare state and the rise of the carceral order: Welfare's retrenchment, not by accident coinciding with the advances of the Civil Rights movement, marks the decline of state power and legitimacy in one domain, necessitating the establishment of political control in another. For these authors, who see the welfare state less as receding than as changing, the relationship of welfare and carceral governance is one of parallel and interactive more than of causal processes (p. 295). Welfare and carceral institutions alike experience the effects of neoliberal paternalism and of racial constructions. Welfare governance frames the lives primarily of women,Footnote 6 incarceration of men. They note approvingly Wacquant's reference to these domains of control as the “right” and “left” hands of the state. Moreover, “penal logics” have increasingly infused the conduct of welfare governance.
Nonetheless, the authors take issue with what they see as Wacquant's overemphasis on punishment: “Punishment is not the disciplinary alpha and omega of neo-liberal paternalism taking the place of an ‘American social state that now lies in ruins’” (p. 8). Rather, they emphasize the importance (in Foucauldian terms) of a “productive project of discipline” (p. 8) that “cultivate[s] mentalities of self-rule” (p. 297). “The ultimate purpose of these changes,” they argue, “is to transform the poor themselves—to make them into the kinds of subjects who voluntarily embrace particular kinds of choices and behaviors” (p. 9). For Wacquant, welfare is subsumed by punishment. For the authors, punishment is a piece of welfare.
Where does the line fall between discipline and punishment? As my opening anecdote suggests, I think the authors make a vital intervention in the discussion of poverty governance by describing the ways that disciplinary “truths” are purveyed about work and responsibility. And no doubt these “truths” are accepted, articulated, and disseminated by many who enforce them. Neoliberal norms in the managing of the poor may resonate most with the managers.Footnote 7 But to what extent are these “truths” internalized or embodied by the poor themselves?
To insist as I would (with Wacquant) on the monumental force of punishment in the contemporary governance of the poor is to remark not only on the outright and growing criminalization of welfare itself (with the spread of surveillance, drug testing, loss of motor vehicle licenses, fines, charges of fraud, and the jailing of fathers who fall behind in child supportFootnote 8)—developments at least some of which Soss, Fording, and Schram amply document. Nor is it only to dwell on the now widely recognized ballooning of the prison population: Bookended between Piven and Cloward's Reference Piven and Cloward1971 study and this 2011 publication, the incarceration numbers in state and federal prisons and local jails raced upwards from an estimated 357,000 in 1970 to 2.2 million in 2010.Footnote 9 Nor is it, merely, to draw attention to ways that poverty now normalizes penality: In the late 1970s, 14.7% of black, male, high school dropouts were likely to have gone to prison by their mid-to-late thirties, a figure that had risen to a full 68% among the very same demographic group by 2010.Footnote 10 What does bear emphatic attention, rather, is the likely extent to which “discipline” would fail absent the iron hand of punishment. When the sanctions that construct the “responsible worker” are the threat of the loss of livelihood or the prospect of criminal charges or time in jail, this is as much about “penality” as it is about “discipline.”
It is this titanic quantum of punishment (even overshadowing the important role of “discipline”) that makes Soss, Fording, and Schram's inferences about the implications for American politics so sobering. As they summarize, “Surveying the evidence, we conclude that disciplinary poverty governance has failed to deliver on its promises and is failing poor Americans today. Its carceral emphasis is destabilizing poor communities, exacerbating civic marginality and undermining the social and economic prospects of millions of people born into poverty” (p. 292).
