The Wedding of Workfare and Prisonfare in the 21stCentury

This article explains how and why the prison has returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it had entered into irremediable decline. Building on my book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, I argue that (1) the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts, and the penitentiary are a response not to crime trends but to diffusing social insecurity; that (2) we need to reconnect social policies and penal policies and treat them as two modalities of poverty policy to grasp the new politics of urban marginality; and that (3) the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” partakes of the forging of the neoliberal state. After spotlighting key differences between the American and the European road to the penalization of poverty, I adapt Bourdieu's concept of “bureaucratic field” to capture the symbolic import of punishment as a means of reality production and I stress the contingent nature of penal resurgence, against conspiracy theories and the functionalist vision shared by Marxist and Foucaultian analysts.