Theorizing Punishment: Reflections on Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor

In this essay, I consider how Loic Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor adds to the diverse and growing body of scholarship about contemporary penal change. I begin with an overview of Wacquant’s major arguments and elucidations, then I focus in on how this work fits specifically within theorizations about, and empirical examinations of, late modern punishment. In so doing, I describe the ways in which this work seems to contribute to an ongoing conversation about penality, and then conclude with a discussion of how the arguments in Punishing the Poor might be complicated by attending to recent scholarship that looks at micro-level jurisdictional penal change, and the differences across place.