Poverty Politics and Crime Control in Europe and America

The growth of prisons and jails over the last thirty years transformed the social experience of American poverty. Penal confinement became commonplace for poor men of working age. Incarceration added to the unstable home life of poor children and their mothers, whose own imprisonment rates had also grown rapidly. Loı̈c Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty (in part, first published in French in 1999) can be read as a forerunner to the author’s trilogy, Urban Outcasts (2007), Punishing the Poor (2009), and Deadly Symbiosis (2009). Together, these works describe a new urban poverty embedded in the institutions of criminal punishment. In the main thesis of Prisons of Poverty, punitive crime policy joined with a stingy welfare state to propel neoliberal political projects in the United States and Europe. Though regularly trafficking in free market rhetoric, the neoliberal state assumed a muscular role in the lives of the inner-city poor through the agency of the police and penal institutions. In Wacquant’s account, the punitive management of urban poverty was set in motion in the late 1960s. Richard Nixon, in the presidential campaign of 1968, touted a lawand-order message that resonated with white voters discomfited by urban riots and Civil Rights protest. As the problem of urban disorder was thrust into the political spotlight, penal policy experts—and their commitment to rehabilitation—were marginalized. The political and cultural backlash to the tumultuous 1960s ran headlong into the economic collapse of the ghetto. In describing how the jobless ghetto contributed to mass incarceration, Wacquant (pp. 155–56) writes that,