Loïc Wacquant’s new book is the middle volume of an ambitious trilogy, tackling territory between the earlier Prisons of Poverty, which looks at the world-wide diffusion of notions, technologies, and policies of “public safety” that first emerged in the United States; and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State, which, as its title signals, examines directly the effects of ethno-racial division on punishment regimes. There is, it should be said at the outset, considerable overlap between these discussions and, even confining ourselves to the book at hand, a good deal of repetition of the same basic points, as though repeating an argument would lend it greater force. Much more centrally than the other volumes, however, Punishing the Poor examines the changing activities of the police, the courts, and the prison system as these are directed towards the management and containment of those who reside at the very margins of social and urban space. It argues that developments in the penal sphere cannot be understood without simultaneously examining the welfare apparatus, most especially the welfare “reforms” enacted during the Clinton administration, since the two sectors, Wacquant argues, need to be seen as “a single apparatus for the cultural capture and behavioral control of marginal populations” (p. xix). And this gives, as he freely acknowledges, a necessarily oversimplified and overdramatized tone to his discussion, as he seeks to highlight discourses and practices still struggling to be born.

Already, in the preceding paragraph, we have encountered some key features of Wacquant's approach, and some hints about its intellectual genealogy. Like another major contemporary theorist of punishment, David Garland, Wacquant wants to emphasize both punishment's material and its symbolic dimensions, and his approach thereby incorporates elements drawn from Durkheim and Elias, Marx and Foucault. And like Durkheim and Foucault (and Garland come to that), Wacquant sees social control as a central societal phenomenon, and as a crucial element in any analysis of modern society. Most emphatically, in Wacquant's case, the influence of his one-time teacher, Pierre Bourdieu, also looms large, and underpins his twin insistence that, however (over)determined his functional account of “prisonfare” and “workfare” may seem, other historical possibilities remain open; and that “the penalization of poverty” is emphatically not “a deliberate ‘plan’ pursued by malevolent and omnipotent rulers [...] [or that] some systemic need (of capitalism, racism, or panopticism) mysteriously mandates the runaway activation and glorification of the penal sector of the bureaucratic field” (p. xx). The reader would be well-advised to bear these caveats firmly in mind in the substantive chapters that follow, for indeed, these are analytical dangers the text recurrently courts.

Though there are more than gestures at developments elsewhere, particularly at the importation of American techniques and ideas into France and other parts of Western Europe, Wacquant's primary focus is on “the immense scope of the US carceral archipelago [and] the tightening hold that the penal apparatus exerts on the societal body”. The statistics are stark. Three and a half decades ago, American prison populations were in decline – not as rapid a decline as the parallel decline in the rates of incarceration in mental hospitals, but a non-trivial pattern of decline nonetheless. Ideologically, the Enlightenment-spawned penitentiary seemed to be in retreat. Criminologists demolished its rehabilitative pretensions, and the word spread that in corrections, “nothing works”. The stage seemed set for a decarceration in the penal sector paralleling the contemporary near abolition of the museums of madness in which the mentally ill had been collected and contained since Victorian times.

Some foolhardy analysts, the present writer among them, succumbed to the temptation to project the contemporary disenchantment with imprisonment into the future. The reality has been far different: “the penal state has surged suddenly, grown voraciously, and forced itself into the center of the institutional horizon faced by America's poor” (p. 18). Leaving aside the hundreds of thousands detained in city and county jails, the population of state and federal penitentiaries in the United States exploded from the mid-1970s onwards. From under 200,000 and falling in 1970, the prison census abruptly reversed course, “jumping to nearly one million in 1995, an increase of 442 percent in a quarter-century” (p. 61). Simultaneously, its racial composition sharply altered: “the number of African-American convicts increased sevenfold” and in 1995, for the first time, they constituted a majority of prison inmates, though only 12 percent of the population at large was black (p. 61). Adding in those in jail and under supervision via probation or parole, and the total population drawn into the criminal justice arena has come to exceed five million, or more than 2.5 percent of the total. Even more dramatic: “as early as 1990, 40 percent of African American males aged 18-35 in California were behind bars or on probation and parole; this rate reached 42 percent in Washington, DC, and topped 56 percent in Baltimore” (p. 63).

If the surge in prison populations and in the numbers being “disciplined and punished”, is one central element in Wacquant's analysis, an almost equally important place in his discussion is the changing face of the always under-developed welfare state in America: the replacement of LBJ's “War on Poverty”, by Clinton's “war on the poor” – for such is Wacquant's general take on what he calls the reactionary welfare “reforms” of the late 1990s. Societal resources, he suggests, were not just redirected away from the poor. Rather, poverty itself was criminalized – often literally, in the case of the male poor; but figuratively with respect to the single mothers and children who formed the overwhelming bulk of those in need of public assistance. That assistance became steadily harder to get, was time-limited, and even more stigmatizing to accept than in prior historical eras. Though the majority of those receiving welfare were the white rural poor, the image of the welfare recipient became overwhelmingly black and brown, as was also true of criminals. “Poverty came to be consistently painted with a black face in the mass media. As the poor grew darker in the collective conscience, they were also cast in an increasingly unsympathetic and lurid light, as irresponsible, profligate, and dissolute” (p. 83). Welfare regimes became harsher and more punitive, as did crime control with the rise of minimum mandatory sentencing and three strikes laws. That all these developments, symbolic and substantive, occurred at the same time was, he claims, no accident. They formed a unitary and mutually reinforcing set of changes in the American state.

And they took place against the broader background of the rise of the neo-liberal state, the globalization of the economy, and the marginalization of the unskilled worker. The impact of these socio-economic changes has been the growing immiseration of many segments of society. Those sucked down into the sub-proletariat live, and are trapped in, conditions of profound “material insecurity and socio-cultural destitution” (p. 70). They are at once excluded from stable wage labour and from public assistance. They are, Wacquant insists, the casualties of the neo-liberal order, the flotsam and jetsam thrown up by deindustrialization, the de-regulation of the economy, and the retraction of the welfare state.

Right wing analysts, and theorists of the “third way”, like Anthony Giddens, reverse the causal arrows. They blame the welfare state for inadvertently encouraging the creation of “decaying, crime-ridden housing estates” and a class that sinks into permanent dependence on state handouts. High rates of crime are one of many pathologies that are indicative of the “civic decline” which results. For Wacquant, this completely misses the boat. He wants nothing to do with schemes for “order-maintaining policing” and what he terms “the law and order mythology of ‘broken windows’” – a reference to the argument made by some criminologists that smashed windows and urban graffiti signal to upright citizens that an area is unsafe, and thus bring about larger scale urban decline – though elsewhere, he does concede the existence of “the criminality and insecurity that eat away at the fabric of daily life in the collapsing ghetto” (p. 93). Wacquant rightly criticizes the weak empirical foundation on which the “broken windows” argument rests, and he draws attention to the paradox that rising rates of imprisonment occurred despite falling crime rates over much of the period he examines. Still, I suspect that we shall see an intense debate about whether his more fundamental claims are correct, or whether the arguments made long ago by Pat Moynihan and others more accurately diagnose what has been transpiring.

Quite properly, in accounting for the massive expansion of the American carceral archipelago, Wacquant pays close attention to America's benighted “war on drugs”, a policy implemented during a period when drug use was in decline that has turned out to be catastrophically misguided. Notoriously, penalties for “crack cocaine”, used primarily in black ghettoes, produce punishments many times more severe than those for the powdered cocaine that is the drug of choice in suburban households. A very substantial fraction of those imprisoned have fallen foul of these laws. In Wacquant's view, the selective penality on view here is typical of the way toughened penal sanctions have been disproportionately visited upon marginalized youth from declining urban areas.

Symbolically, mass media and the legal system combine to create a series of what Stan Cohen has called “moral panics” – which in turn are exploited by law-and-order politicians. Willie Horton, the black rapist of a white woman, becomes emblematic of the dangers of being “soft on crime”. Along with a second target for special diligence and severity, the roaming and isolated lower-class pedophile, it is the sub-proletarian blacks from the imploding ghetto, shorn of marketable cultural capital and all-but-forced into the illegal street economy, who are the public face of crime. Policing and prosecutions in turn, he alleges, are selectively targeted at street crime and at drug offenses among blacks. The upshot is that “the prison serves mainly to warehouse the precarious and deproletarianized fractions of the black working class” (p. 208), and blacks come to be vastly over-represented in the prison system.

All of this comes at huge cost, both social and fiscal. As to the latter, the financial burden hyper-incarceration represents, not just in costs to imprison and to treat the growing medical problems of a rapidly aging inmate population, but also in terms of “the deleterious effects on the social structure and culture of the communities the prisoners come from” (p. 167) has explosive medium and long-term implications for the state. As California faces fiscal meltdown, for instance, the one sector that has proved largely immune to the pressures to slash public expenditures has been the prison system. While schools, higher education, infrastructure, and programs for the poor and disabled have borne the brunt of the budget-cutting axe, even the most minor adjustments to the carceral apparatus have been approached with utmost caution, politicians on both sides of the aisle viewing the label of being “soft on crime” as poisonous to their political careers. The out-sourcing of prisons to private entrepreneurs to drive down costs has been exploited to some extent, as have policies that have “ushered a noticeable deterioration of conditions of confinement” (p. 173) – though, as in the California case, if conditions deteriorate too far, there is always the threat that the federal courts will intervene and order mass release or the expenditure of vast additional funds the state protests it is unable to find. The contradiction is inescapable. Prisoners have been turned into an abomination, “the incarnation of absolute evil: the living antithesis of the ‘American dream’ whose banishment serves as collective exorcism” (p. 186). So the prospect of their release into the community arouses paroxysms of anxiety and massive resistance. But the continuation of current policies seems to threaten to bankrupt the state. It would appear that public policy has been driven into a blind alley.

Wacquant's attempts to suggest ways out of this “penal escalation without end or exit” (p. 281) struck this reader as utopian and unrealistic. He has nonetheless produced a powerful polemic, which forces us to confront what it rapidly becoming a major contemporary crisis. Whether one accepts his analysis of the origins and functions of hyperincarceration or not, of its reality and its pernicious effects there can be little doubt. That its continued escalation will at some point become unsustainable seems obvious. But what it not so clear is how the contradictions embodied in the policies in place for the past three decades can possibly be resolved. We indeed seem to be plunged into a Sartrean hell, from which there is “No Exit”.