SPACES OF PUNITIVE VIOLENCE Prisons of Poverty by Loic Wacquant, expanded edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 232. .00 cloth, $20.00 paper.The United States now operates largest, most expensive, and arguably most harshly punitive prison system on earth. In a series of articles and books, notably Punishing Poor and recently expanded and reissued Prisons of Poverty, sociologist Loic Wacquant places this vast machinery of human dispossession at center of his account of our political present.1 decades since Richard Nixon presidency, Wacquant argues, have been defined by the transition from social to state (1): As an ascendant neoliberalism dismantled twentieth century's institutions of welfare and public health, and as industrial economy gave way to a postindustrial order characterized by a heightened instability and erosion of workers' rights, governments at all levels began using prisons to manage a whole range of social problems - mental illness, drug addiction, vagrancy, and, above all, poverty itself. Incarceration, Wacquant writes, has de facto become America's largest government program for poor (69). It is only one of ironies of his story, and not most devastating one, that politicians who came into office on promises of smaller government have, in reality, eagerly created this monster.Wacquant sets out to expose propaganda and policy decisions that inform what he calls America's penal common sense (7). What is at stake, beyond panic over urban violence and spectacle of a tough-on-crime crackdown, is actually the redefinition of missions of state, which is everywhere . . . asserting necessity to reduce its social role and to enlarge, as well as harden, its intervention (8). Wacquant's project is to subject falsehoods disseminated by speechwriters, journalists, and hired experts and think tanks to more rigorous analytic methods of academic sociology. According to evidence he marshals, mass incarceration functions neither to reduce crime nor to cope, in any sensible way, with social instability generated by economic transformation. He hopes to contribute to research and activist programs that might open way for consideration of political alternatives.At same time, though, Wacquant is concerned with imaginative aspects of life under state. He wishes to combine a Marxian, materialist analysis with a one adapted from Emile Durkheim and from Wacquant's own teacher, Pierre Bourdieu: The prison, Wacquant writes in Punishing Poor, symbolizes material divisions and materializes relations of symbolic power; its operation ties together inequality and identity, fuses domination and signification, and welds passions and interests that traverse and roil society.2 Thus, his work offers provocations not only for policy makers but also for critics of culture.From mid-1970s until very recently - that is, during decades under investigation in Prisons of Poverty - study of incarceration in critical humanities was dominated by Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975).3 Foucault set aside question of justice to describe prison as a site where new regimes of power and knowledge were manifest in concrete. He also turned away from ideals of many reformers, past and present, by suggesting that incarceration works most insidiously not when it deprives inmates of freedom and humanity but when it cultivates them as peculiarly disciplined subjects. With its critique of penological discourse and its attention to interior life of prisoner, Foucault's work was a gift to literary critics. It enabled reconsideration of such major concepts as character, confession, and selfexpression, and some of studies that drew from Foucault became scholarly classics in their own right. …