1 The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty

Abstract

More than the specifics of statistical figures and trends, it is the deep-seated logic of this swing from the social to the penal that one must grasp here. Far from contradicting the neoliberal project of deregulation and decay of the public sector, the irresistible rise of the U.S. penal state constitutes, as it were, its negative — in the sense of obverse but also of revelator — since it manifests the implementation of a policy of criminalization of poverty that is the indispensable complement to the imposition of precarious and underpaid wage labor as civic obligation for those locked at the bottom of the class and caste structure, as well as the redeployment of socialwelfare programs in a restrictive and punitive sense that is concomitant with it. At the time of its institutionalization in the United States of the mid-nineteenth century, “imprisonment was above all a method aiming at the control of deviant and dependent populations,” and inmates were mainly poor people and European immigrants recently arrived in the New World. 1 Nowadays, the carceral apparatus of the United States fills an analogous role with respect to those groups rendered superfluous or incongruous by the twofold restructuring of the wage labor relation and state charity: the declining fractions of the working class and poor blacks at the core of formerly industrial cities. In so doing, it has regained a central place in the system of the instruments for the government of poverty, at the crossroads of the deskilled labor market, the collapsing urban ghetto, and social-welfare services “reformed” with a view to buttressing the discipline of desocialized wage work.