Prisons of Poverty by Loïc Wacquant, expanded edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 232. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper

Smith, Caleb

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CriticismVolume 55 | Issue 1 Article 82013Spaces of Punitive ViolenceCaleb SmithYale University, caleb.smith@yale.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationSmith, Caleb (2013) "Spaces of Punitive Violence," Criticism: Vol. 55: Iss. 1, Article 8.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol55/iss1/8 161Criticism Winter 2013, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 161–168. issN 0011-1589.© 2013 by Wayne state university Press, detroit, Michigan 48201-1309sPAces of PuNiTiVe VioLeNcecaleb smithPrisons of Poverty by Loïc Wacquant, expanded edition. Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 2009. Pp. 232. $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.The united states now operates the largest, most expensive, and arguably most harshly punitive prison system on earth. in a series of articles and books, notably Pun-ishing the Poor and the recently expanded and reissued Prisons of Poverty, the sociologist Loïc Wac-quant places this vast machinery of human dispossession at the center of his account of our political pres-ent.1 The decades since the rich-ard Nixon presidency, Wacquant argues, have been defined by “the transition from the social state to the penal state” (1): As an ascen-dant neoliberalism dismantled the twentieth century’s institutions of welfare and public health, and as the industrial economy gave way to a postindustrial order character-ized by a heightened instability and the erosion of workers’ rights, gov-ernments at all levels began using prisons to manage a whole range of social problems—mental illness, drug addiction, vagrancy, and, above all, poverty itself. “incar-ceration,” Wacquant writes, “has de facto become America’s largest government program for the poor” (69). it is only one of the ironies of his story, and not the most devas-tating one, that the politicians who came into office on promises of smaller government have, in real-ity, eagerly created this monster.Wacquant sets out to expose the propaganda and the policy de-cisions that inform what he calls America’s “penal common sense” 162 cALeb sMiTh(7). What is at stake, beyond the panic over urban violence and the spectacle of a tough-on-crime crackdown, is actually “the redefi-nition of the missions of the state, which is everywhere . . . asserting the necessity to reduce its social role and to enlarge, as well as harden, its penal intervention” (8). Wacquant’s project is to subject the falsehoods disseminated by speechwriters, journalists, and hired experts and think tanks to the more rigorous analytic methods of academic soci-ology. According to the evidence he marshals, mass incarceration func-tions neither to reduce crime nor to cope, in any sensible way, with the social instability generated by eco-nomic transformation. he hopes to contribute to research and activist programs that might open the way for the consideration of political alternatives.At the same time, though, Wac-quant is concerned with the imagi-native aspects of life under the penal state. he wishes to combine a Marxian, “materialist” analy-sis with a “symbolic” one adapted from Émile durkheim and from Wacquant’s own teacher, Pierre bourdieu: “The prison,” Wac-quant writes in Punishing the Poor, “symbolizes material divisions and materializes relations of symbolic power; its operation ties together inequality and identity, fuses domi-nation and signification, and welds the passions and interests that tra-verse and roil society.”2 Thus, his work offers provocations not only for policy makers but also for crit-ics of culture.from the mid-1970s until very recently—that is, during the de-cades under investigation in Prisons of Poverty—the study of incarcera-tion in the critical humanities was dominated by Michel foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975).3 fou-cault set aside the question of jus-tice to describe the prison as a site where new regimes of power and knowledge were manifest in con-crete. he also turned away from the ideals of many reformers, past and present, by suggesting that in-carceration works most insidiously not when it deprives inmates of freedom and humanity but when it cultivates them as peculiarly disci-plined subjects. With its critique of penological discourse and its atten-tion to the interior life of the pris-oner, foucault’s work was a gift to literary critics. it enabled the recon-sideration of such major concepts as character, confession, and self-expression, and some of the studies that drew from foucault became scholarly classics in their own right. even as Discipline and Punish was being enshrined as a masterpiece of theory, though, the American prison system was changing in ways that foucault could not have foreseen.foucault’s suspicion was that the penitentiary’s modes of surveillance and training had become so normal-ized, so diffused, so integrated into  oN WAcQuANT’s PrisoNs oF PoVertY 163the institutions of everyday life, that imprisonment itself would dwindle into obsolescence. instead, the era of foucault’s preeminence in the acad-emy was the era of a world- historical prison boom. hardly a vestige, the prison became the defining institu-tion of Wacquant’s penal state:from its low point in 1973, the curve of the incarcerated population made an abrupt about-face and then took off: a dozen years later, the number of persons behind bars had doubled to 740,000 on its way to passing 1.5 mil-lion in 1995 and breaking the 2- million mark in 2000, thanks to an astounding aver-age annual growth of nearly 8 percent through the 1990s, bringing in a net increment of 1,500 inmates every week. The carceral system of the united states has now bal-looned to proportions such that if it were a city it would be the country’s fourth-larg-est metropolis. (60)for these reasons, among oth-ers, critical prison studies began to move in new directions. Two lines of thought, in particular, led away from foucault’s critique of subjection.The first, returning in some ways to an earlier generation’s pro-test, described the prison as a scene of abjection, dehumanization, and living death. drawing especially from the genre now known as prison literature, critics empha-sized that America’s increasingly vengeful prison regime stripped away the rights and mortified the bodies of its captives. Many drew connections to the history of slav-ery, emphasizing that American institutions of captivity have al-ways been scenes of racialization; others invoked the ideas of civil death and bare life to make sense of the torture and indefinite deten-tion on display in the war prisons of the second bush’s administra-tion. here, the figure of the pris-oner appeared less as a disciplined subject than as a dispossessed, al-most gothic other.4Wacquant recognizes that the hyperexpansion of the prison sys-tem has been accompanied by “a new cultural industry of the fear and loathing of (lower-class and dark-skinned) offenders” (5). Like several other scholars of impris-onment in America, he sees the continuities between the mass in-carceration of the present and the Jim crow order of the past: from one point of view, he observes, “in-carceration is only the paroxystic manifestation of the logic of eth-noracial exclusion of which the ghetto has been the instrument and product since its historical in-ception” (81). As his attention to the sites of exclusion already sug-gests, however, Wacquant’s most original insights belong to another 164 cALeb sMiThmovement in post-foucauldian prison studies, a kind of spatial turn.Although foucault analyzed architectural models like the pan-opticon and the development of a far-ranging (though informal) ar-chipelago of carceral apparatuses, his most generative arguments, for literary critics at least, concerned a disciplinary soul that was thought to supervise, manage, and restrain the unruly energies of the devi-ant body. Now, confronting the rapid expansion of the prison sys-tem itself, critics of the penal state have begun to think in geographic terms. one recent collection of ac-tivist writings, for example, claims that the function of incarceration has become the mere “warehous-ing” of the poor.5 Also reintegrating economic history and prison stud-ies, ruth Wilson gilmore charts the relations between collapsing urban centers and the rural penal institutions of california’s “golden gulag.”6 Wacquant, too, redraws the map to connect the city, the na-tion-state, and neoliberalism’s globe (particularly britain and europe). he does so by reconstructing the conception and implementation of a single program of crisis manage-ment across these three zones.in the first chapter of Prisons of Poverty, Wacquant recollects the recent past, telling a story that be-gins with rudolph giuliani’s New york city in the 1990s. Wacquant’s target is the myth that giuliani and his once-celebrated police chief, William bratton, salvaged the city from crime by instituting “zero tolerance” or “broken windows” policies that aggressively pun-ished such minor offenses as van-dalism and trespassing. giuliani and bratton made their names by going after “petty drug retailers, prostitutes, beggars, the homeless, drifters, and perpetrators of graf-fiti and other urban depredations” (16). The poor, especially poor people of color, experienced zero tolerance as an intensifying harass-ment, intimidation, or worse. but, for affluent whites, the city under giuliani began to feel like a safer place to work and shop. “in short,” Wacquant explains, “the enemy is the subproletariat that mars the scenery and menaces or annoys the consumers of urban space” (16).from the hyperpolicing of the city center, Wacquant broadens his view to examine how New york city’s policies were transmit-ted across the united states, as the fear of urban violence animated a hardening of police practices and criminal codes. The spread of zero tolerance, according to Prisons of Poverty, was helped along by the false premise that the strategy had wrought a miracle of crime reduc-tion in New york city. in fact, the crime rates in most American cities, including those with very different policing strategies, were declining at a similar pace in the mid-1990s. but New york, unlike most other  oN WAcQuANT’s PrisoNs oF PoVertY 165cities, produced a propaganda cam-paign that linked the new security of its urban spaces to its distinc-tively aggressive law-enforcement policies. Leading the way was the think tank known as the Manhat-tan institute. in the ronald rea-gan era, the Manhattan institute had funded the work of such New right intellectuals as charles Mur-ray, providing the framework for zero tolerance; a decade later, it was ready to popularize the myth of the giuliani miracle.Meanwhile, the rapid growth of the prison population supple-mented the transition from wel-fare to workfare, a model designed to force the poor into the kind of low-wage, precarious employment that characterizes the postindus-trial American city. This point is central to Wacquant’s analysis. un-like some other activist scholars, he does not describe mass incarcera-tion in terms of a prison-industrial complex designed to generate prof-its out of inmates’ labor. indeed, Wacquant dismisses the idea of the prison-industrial complex as a paranoid thesis “anchored in a con-spiratorial vision of history” (84):[T]he ritual denunciation of the superexploitation of inmates under conditions evocative of penal slavery cannot hide the fact that only a miniscule and stagnant fraction of the u.s. carceral population works for outside firms (under 1 percent by the most generous counts) and that no economic sector relies even marginally on convict laborers. As for the prison-ers toiling for state or fed-eral industries behind bars, their output is negligible and they are “employed” at a net loss to the government, even though their activity is mas-sively subsidized and heavily protected. (85)Wacquant argues that the new era of mass incarceration is best understood not according to an outmoded logic of industrial ex-ploitation but in relation to neo-liberalism’s reorganization of the economy and of the character of government. for Wacquant, then, the subject of investigation is “not so much crime and punishment as the reengineering of the state to promote, then respond to, the eco-nomic and sociomoral conditions coalescing under hegemonic neo-liberalism” (162). The benefits to capitalism, such as they are, come through shutting down alterna-tives to low-wage, low-stability employment for the poor: on one hand, the destruction of welfare programs; on the other, the harsh criminalization of the illegitimate economy, even of joblessness itself. in the end, Wacquant’s notion of “hegemonic neoliberalism” may be no less conspiratorial than oth-ers’ visions of a vast, exploitative 166 cALeb sMiTh“complex,” but the distinction is a meaningful one.Another of Wacquant’s central arguments is that the neoliberal de-velopment of a penal state has not been confined to the united states: “from New york, the doctrine of ‘zero tolerance’ as instrument of legitimation of the penal manage-ment of troublesome poverty, that is, visible poverty that causes dis-ruptions and annoyance in public space . . . has propagated itself across the globe with lighting speed” (19). Prisons of Poverty documents the international celebrity of giuliani, bratton, and Murray; it explores the implementation of American poli-cies in Latin America, in the united Kingdom, and especially in france, the author’s home country. indeed, the activist edge of Wacquant’s proj-ect is here, in his effort tocircumvent the dominant policy and media discourse fostering the diffusion of this new punitive doxa and to alert european scholars, civic leaders, and the interested citizenry to the shady springs of this diffusion, as well as to the dire social consequences and political dangers of the growth and glorification of the penal wing of the state. (161)his aim, in short, is to intervene in a conversation among the credentialed experts who inform the decisions of governing bureaucrats and, more broadly, in the public sphere.Wacquant writes in a lively, pug-nacious style, and with a polemical intensity, but he addresses himself to a public whose deliberations are presumed to conform to the norms of rational-critical discourse. for a work of academic sociology, Pris-ons of Poverty has certainly found a wide readership. since the first french edition in 1999, Wacquant notes, his book has been translated into a dozen languages and become a key text for anti-incarceration movements on three continents. its actual effects on policy would be difficult to measure, but the book has certainly made a mark.What, meanwhile, of its conse-quences for the study of literature, the arts, and culture at the margins of a policy-oriented public sphere? Most obviously, Prisons of Poverty might enable the critique of mass-media texts that demonize the subproletariat, above all impover-ished black and brown men, as so many predators stalking the streets. There are echoes of the frankfurt school in Wacquant’s invocation of a mystifying, fear-mongering “cultural industry” that does the ideological work of the penal state in the field of mass culture. in Pun-ishing the Poor, he goes so far as to compare this industry’s media spec-tacles to the redundant titillations of pornography: oN WAcQuANT’s PrisoNs oF PoVertY 167[T]he law-and-order merry-go-round is to criminality what pornography is to amo-rous relations: a mirror de-forming reality to the point of the grotesque that arti-ficially extracts delinquent behaviors from the fabric of social relations in which they take root and make sense, deliberately ignores their causes and their meanings, and reduces their treatment to a series of conspicuous position-takings, often ac-robatic, sometimes properly unreal, pertaining to the cult of ideal performance rather than to the pragmatic atten-tion to the real.7As i reflected on Prisons of Pov-erty, though, i found myself more intrigued by Wacquant’s account of public space, especially the space of the metropolitan center. An impor-tant implication of his book, and of the spatial turn in critical prison studies, is that the penal state is op-erative in sites where we might not be accustomed to looking for it: not only within the prison interior—nor quite, as foucault suggested, in the interior life of every modern subject—but also, peculiarly, in cit-ies that seem to have been emptied of their “troublesome poverty” and transformed into smooth, clean zones for the enjoyment of “con-sumers of urban space.”To take the readiest example, it becomes possible to think of the shops, museums, and parks of Manhattan in the early-twenty-first century as sites violently carved out of the urban landscape by the penal state. A connection might be drawn to art and architecture critic hal foster’s account of the postmodern spectacle city, where the psychic ex-perience of urban space, once one of the richest fields of sociological theory, has itself been commodi-fied.8 here, the arts participate in neoliberalism’s reordering of the world not by transmitting its ideol-ogy in any representative sense, but in the material forms and scenes of their presence. here, too, the occupation of urban space by an emergent social movement against the neoliberal order might forge a bond between its economic de-mands and the critical resistance to mass incarceration.Caleb Smith is professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the Ameri-can Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009), and he edits the website Imagined Prisons (http://www.imaginedprisons.org).NoTes 1. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: the Neoliberal Government of social instabil-ity (durham, Nc: duke university Press, 2009), and Prisons of Poverty. un-less otherwise noted, quotations cited parenthetically in the text are from this edition of Prisons of Poverty.168 cALeb sMiTh 2. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, xvi. 3. Michel foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the Prison, trans. Alan sheridan (New york: Vintage, 1977). 4. see, for example, colin dayan, the story of Cruel and unusual (boston: boston review/MiT, 2007), and the law is a White Dog: how legal rituals Make and unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton university Press, 2011). in my own first book, the Prison and the american imagination (yale studies in english [New haven, cT: yale uni-versity Press, 2009]), i suggested that these two ways of representing carceral life might not be as irreconcilable as they appear. for an overview of recent trends in the interdisciplinary field of prison studies, see Peter Monaghan, “field report: Prison studies,” Chronicle of higher education review, 1 November 2009. 5. Tara herivel and Paul Wright, eds., Prison Nation: the Warehousing of the Poor (New york: routledge, 2003). 6. ruth Wilson gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, Crisis, and opposition in Globalizing California, American crossroads (berkeley: university of california Press, 2007). 7. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, xii–xiii. 8. see hal foster, Design and Crime (and other Diatribes) (London: Verso, 2003), and the art-architecture Complex (Lon-don: Verso, 2011).

Spaces of Punitive Violence

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