‘The Prison is an Outlaw Institution’

This discussion ofLesPrisons de la misère(Raisons d'agirEditions,Paris, 1999 – expanded and updatedEnglish‐language edition,Prisons ofPoverty,Minneapolis,University ofMinnesotaPress, 2009) responds to queries put forth by the editors ofRde réeland originally published inFrench in that journal inJune 2000 (vol. 3, pp.33–8). It argues that the carceral boom in theUnitedStates results from the penalisation of poverty correlative of the simultaneous revamping of the economic, welfare and justice missions of the state. Pro‐market think tanks have played a driving role in fashioning and diffusingAmerica's ‘punitive common sense’ across theAtlantic, thus accelerating the import of aggressive crime rhetorics and policies inWesternEurope by political elites (including Left governments) seduced by neoliberal ideology. But, while the prison purports to enforce the law and to curtail the disorders generated by economic deregulation, the recent French experience confirms that its very organisation and daily operation make it an outlaw institution. It is promoted as a remedy for criminal insecurity and urban marginality, but it only serves to concentrate and intensify both, even as it makes them temporarily invisible. To get out of the policy and civic impasse into which the penalisation of poverty leads contemporary societies, we must raise anew the quintessentially political question of the purpose(lessness) of incarceration at century's dawn.