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The single greatestpolitical transforma-tion of the post-civil rights era in Ameri-ca is the joint rolling back of the stingysocial state and rolling out of the gargan-tuan penal state that have remade thecountrys stratication, cities, and civicculture, and are recasting the very char-acter of blackness itself. Together, thesetwo concurrent and convergent thrustshave effectively redrawn the perimeter,mission, and modalities of action of pub-

lic authority when it comes to managingthe deprived and stigmatized populationsstuck at the bottom of the class, ethnic,and urban hierarchy. The concomitantdownsizing of the welfare wing and up-sizing of the criminal justice wing of theAmerican state have not been driven byraw trends in poverty and crime, butfueled by a politics of resentment towardcategories deemed undeserving and un-ruly. Chief among those stigmatized pop-ulations are the public-aid recipients andthe street criminals framed as the two de-monic gureheads of the black under-class that came to dominate the journal-istic, scholarly, and policy debate on theplight of urban America1 in the revan-chist decades that digested the civil dis-orders of the 1960s and the stagflation of

the 1970s, and then witnessed the biggest

carceral boom in world history.2

In this article, I show that the stupen-dous expansion and intensication of theactivities of the American police, criminalcourts, and prison over the past thirtyyears have been nely targeted, rst byclass, second by race, and third by place,leading not to mass incarceration but tothe hyperincarceration of (sub)proletari-an African American men from the im-

ploding ghetto. This triple selectivity re-veals that the building of the hyperactiveand hypertrophic penal state that hasmade the United States world championin incarceration is at once a delayed reac-tion to the civil rights movement and theghetto riots of the mid-1960s3 and a disci-plinary instrument unfurled to foster theneoliberal revolution by helping to im-pose insecure labor as the normal hori-zon of work for the unskilled fractions ofthe postindustrial laboring class.4 Thedouble coupling of the prison with thedilapidated hyperghetto, on the one side,and with supervisory workfare, on theother, is not a moral dilemmaas recent-ly argued by Glenn Loury in his TannerLecture5but a political quandary call-ing for an expanded analysis of the nexusof class inequality, ethnic stigma, and thestate in the age of social insecurity. Re-versing the racialized penalization of

74 Ddalus Summer 2010

Loc Wacquant

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Ddalus Summer 2010 75

poverty in the crumbling inner city re-quires a different policy response thanmass incarceration would and calls foran analysis of the political obstacles tothis response, which must go beyondtrickle-down penal reform to encom-pass the multifaceted role of the state inproducing and entrenching marginality.

The tale of the unexpected and expo-nential growth of jails and prisons overthe past three decades in America aftera half-century of carceral stability hasoften been told. But the raw increase ofthe population behind barsfrom about380,000 in 1975 to 2 million in 2000 andsome 2.4 million today (counting juve-niles and persons held in police lockups,who are not registered by ofcial correc-tional statistics)is only part of the storyof the multisided expansion of the penalstate.6 Four distinctive yet submergeddimensions of Americas punitive turnafter the close of the Fordist era form thebackdrop to my analysis of the deploy-ment of the disciplinary tentacles of thestate toward the poor.

First, this phenomenal increase is re-markable for having been fueled, not bythe lengthening of the average sentenceas in previous periods of carceral infla-tion, but primarily by thesurge in jail and

prison admissions. Thus the number ofpeople committed to state and federalpenitentiaries by the courts balloonedfrom 159,000 in 1980 to 665,000 in 1997(accounting for more than 80 percent ofinmate growth during that period) beforestabilizing at about a half-million annu-ally after 2002. This surge sharply differ-entiates the United States from WesternEuropean countries, most of which havealso witnessed a steady, if comparativelymodest, rise in incarceration over the pasttwo decades, but one where growing

stock is not due to increases in flow.7A major contributor to this vertical

growth of the carceral system in Ameri-ca is the steep escalation in the volumeof persons arrested by the police and thevastly enlarged role assumed by jails asfrontline dams of social disorders in thecity. This police hyperactivism has beendisproportionate to and disjoined fromtrends in crime. One example: in NewYork City, under the campaign of zerotolerance promoted by then-MayorRudolph Giuliani, the number of arrestsincreased by 40 percent between 1993and 1998 to top 376,000 while crime de-creased by 54 percent to reach 323,000,meaning that the police arrested morepersons than it recorded offenses by theend of that period, compared to half asmany at the start. Even though a grow-ing share of these arrests were abusiveand did not lead to charges, admissionsto jail rose by one-fourth, causing ram-pant congestion and daily pandemoni-um in the citys custodial facilities.8

As a result of intensied policing cou-pled with a rising propensity to conne

miscreants, American jails have becomegargantuan operations processing a dozenmillion bodies each year nationwide, aswell as huge drains on the budgets ofcounties and pivotal institutions in thelives of the (sub)proletariat of the bigcities.9 Indeed, because they treat vastlymore people than do prisons, under con-ditions that are more chaotic due to highturnover, endemic overcrowding, popu-

lation heterogeneity, and the administra-tive shift to bare-bones managerialism(the two top priorities of jail wardens areto minimize violent incidents and to holddown staff overtime), jails create moresocial disruption and family turmoil atthe bottom of the urban order than doprisons. Yet they have remained largelyunder the radar of researchers and policyanalysts alike.10

Second, the vertical rise of the penalsystem has been exceeded by its hori-

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zontal spread: the ranks of those kept inthe long shadow of the prison via probationand parole have swelled even more thanthe population under lock, to about 4 mil-lion and 1 million, respectively. As a re-sult, the total population under criminal

justice supervision bloated from 1.8 mil-lion in 1980 to 6.4 million by 2000 and7.4 million in 2007. Probation and paroleshould be incorporated into the debateon the penal state, not only because theyconcern a much larger population thanthat of convicts (in 1998, eleven stateseach held in excess of 100,000 probation-ers under their heel, more than Francedid, with 87,000), but also because bothare more likely to lead (back) to impris-onment than not: two in ve probation-ers and six in ten parolees who exited thisstatus in 1997 were returned to custodywithin three years, either because theyhad committed a new offense or becausethey had violated one or another admin-istrative condition of their release (fail-ing an alcohol test or losing a job, miss-

ing an appointment with their parole of-cer, or traveling outside of their countyof assignment without permission, forexample). The purpose and functioningof parole have changed drastically overthe past thirty years, from spring towardrehabilitation to penal trap, so that paroleis now properly construed as an extensionof the custodial system, rather than analternative to it.11

The reach of penal authorities hasalso been dramatically enlarged beyondprobation and parole by the exponentialgrowth in the size, scope, and uses ofcriminal justice databases that, as of2000, contained roughly sixty millionles on an estimated thirty-ve millionindividuals. Novel panoptic measures in-clude the diffusion of ofcial rap sheetsthrough the Internet, the routinization

of background checks by employersand realtors, the spread of public noti-

cation statutes (and related laws seek-ing to expurgate specic categories ofconvicts, such as sex offenders, from thesocial body), and the shift from old-stylengerprints and mug shots to dnaprintscoordinated by the fbi.12 These institu-tional tentacles, and the routine practicesof proling, surveillance, and enclosureat a distance that they permit, severelycurtail the life chances of former convictsand their families by stretching the effectsof judicial stigma on the labor, housing,and marital markets as well as into dailylife.13 Legislators have further ampliedthese sanctions by adding a raft of restric-tions on the access of ex-felons to publicservices, privileges, and benets, frompublic housing and public employmentto college scholarships, parenting, andvoting rights.14

Third, the advent of penal big gov-ernment was made possible by aston-ishing increases in funding and person-nel. Prison and jail expenditures in Amer-ica jumped from $7 billion in 1980 to $57

billion in 2000 and exceeded $70 billionin 2007, even as crime rst stagnated andthen declined steadily after 1993. (Mean-while, criminal justice expenditures grewsevenfold, from $33 billion to $216 bil-lion.) This budgetary boom of 660 per-centamounting to a veritable carceral

Marshall Plan during a period when suc-cessive administrations proclaimed torein in public spendingnanced the

infusion of an additional one millioncriminal justice staff, which has madecorrections the third largest employerin the nation, behind only ManpowerInc. and Wal-Mart, with a monthly pay-roll of $2.4 billion.

The upsizing of the carceral functionof government has been rigorously pro-portional to the downsizing of its wel-fare role. In 1980, the country spent

three times as much on its two mainassistance programs ($11 billion for

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Aid to Families with Dependent Chil-dren [afdc] and $10 billion for foodstamps) than on corrections ($7 bil-lion). By 1996, when welfare reformreplaced the right to public assistanceby the obligation to accept insecureemployment as a condition of support,the carceral budget came to double thesums allocated to either afdc or foodstamps ($54 billion compared to $20 bil-lion and $27 billion, respectively). Simi-larly, during the 1990s alone, Washing-ton cut funding for public housing by$17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent)and boosted corrections by $19 billion(an increase of 171 percent), effectivelymaking the construction of prisons thenations main housing program for thepoor.

Fourth, the building of Americasgigantic penal state is a nationwide en-deavor and a bipartisan achievement. Manyscholars have rightly stressed that theUnited States does not have a criminal

justice system so much as a loose patch-

work of independent jurisdictions besetby administrative fragmentation and pol-icy dispersal bordering on incoherence.15

In light of wide regional and state varia-tions, others have highlighted the role oflocal political culture and modes ofcivic engagement in determining themix and intensity of penal sanctions.16

Still others have reported that Republi-can governors, a large African American

urban population, and a states religiousand political culture exert a signicantinfluence on incarceration rates.17 Yet forall these and other geographic disparitiesand peculiarities, it remains that, overthe past thirty-odd years, penal escala-tion has left no corner of the country un-touched and has brought about de factounication in the aggressive deploymentof punishment. Aside from Maine and

Kansas, all states saw their correctionalcounts grow by more than 50 percent be-

tween 1985 and 1995, at the peak of thecarceral boom. Everywhere the ideal ofrehabilitation has been abandoned ordrastically downgraded, making retribu-tion and neutralization the main practi-cal rationale for connement.

Increases in the civic salience of crimeand distrust in government have pushedall jurisdictions toward greater punitive-ness.18 Moreover, policy control overcriminal justice has migrated to the feder-al level, where it has grown steadily moresymbolic and less substantive since the1970s.19 Indeed, this national slant is oneof the distinctive causes of the severity ofthe punitive turn, as it strikes at impov-erished minority districts in the city.20

This national trajectory has been uninter-rupted by changes in political majorityin statehouses, Congress, and the WhiteHouse, as both parties have reflexivelysupported penal activism and expandedincarceration.21 Republicans will claimthat they are tougher on crime, butDemocratic majorities have run up the

carceral tab in California, Illinois, Michi-gan, and New York. It was a Democraticpresident, Jimmy Carter (former governorof Georgia, one of the countrys most re-pressive states), who jump-started Amer-icas great carceral leap forward. Andanother Democratic president (and for-mer governor of another superpunitivestate, Arkansas), Bill Clinton, who pushedfor the most costly crime bill in world

history (the Violent Crime Control andLaw Enforcement Act of 1994), oversawthe single largest expansion of incarcer-ation in the annals of democratic so-cieties: Clinton tallied an increase of465,000 convicts for an added $15 bil-lion, compared to 288,000 convicts for aboost of $8 billion for Ronald Reagan.

The foregoing indicates that thefoot-print of the penal state on the national bodyis much broader and heavier than usually



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depicted. At the same time, it is also con-siderably morepointedthan conveyed bythe current debate. It has become conven-tional among justice activists, journalists,and analysts of the U.S. carceral scene todesignate the unprecedented and unpar-alleled expansion of the American cor-rectional system at the close of the twen-tieth century as mass incarceration.22

The term was (re)introduced in the na-tional prison debate in the late 1990s(until then, it had been used to refer tothe internment of Japanese Americans inconcentration camps during World WarII) and was soon codied by David Gar-land at the interdisciplinary conferenceon Mass Incarceration: Social Causesand Consequences, held at New YorkUniversity in 2000, which boosted re-search on the topic.23 The designation ofmass incarceration is intuitively appeal-ing because it helps spotlight the outlierstatus of the United States on the worldscene, dramatize the condition at hand,and thus draw scholarly and public atten-

tion to it. But, much as it has been usefulin terms of mobilizing intellectual andcivic resources, the notion obscures sig-nal features of the phenomenon.

Mass incarceration is a mischaracteri-zation of what is better termed hyperin-carceration. This is not a mere termino-logical quibble, for the change in word-ing points to a different depiction of thepunitive turn, which leads to a different

causal model and thence to different pol-icy prescriptions.Mass incarceration sug-gests that connement concerns largeswaths of the citizenry (as with the massmedia, mass culture, and mass unem-ployment), implying that the penal nethas been flung far and wide across socialand physical space. This is triply inaccu-rate. First, the prevalence of penal con-nement in the United States, while ex-

treme by international standards, canhardly be said to concern the masses.

Indeed, a rate of 0.75 percent comparesquite favorably with the incidence ofsuch woes as latent tuberculosis infec-tion (estimated at 4.2 percent) and se-vere alcohol dependency (3.81 percent),ailments which no one would seriouslycontend have reached mass proportionsin the United States.24 Next, the expan-sion and intensication of the activitiesof the police, courts, and prison over thepast quarter-century have been anythingbut broad and indiscriminate.25 Theyhave beennely targeted, rst by class,second by that disguised brand of eth-nicity called race, and third by place.This cumulative targeting has led to thehyperincarceration of one particular cate-gory, lower-class African American mentrapped in the crumbling ghetto, while leav-ing the rest of societyincluding, mostremarkably, middle- and upper-class Afri-can Americanspractically untouched.Third, and more important still, thistriple selectivity is a constitutive property ofthe phenomenon: had the penal state been

rolled out indiscriminately by policiesresulting in the capture of vast numbersof whites and well-to-do citizens, capsiz-ing their families and decimating theirneighborhoods as it has for inner-cityAfrican Americans, its growth wouldhave been speedily derailed and eventu-ally stopped by political counteraction.Mass incarceration is socially tolerableand therefore workable as public policy

onlyso long as it does not reach the masses:it is a gure of speech, which hides themultiple lters that operate to point thepenal dagger.26

Class, not race, is the rst lter of se-lection for incarceration. The welcomefocus on race, crime, and punishmentthat has dominated discussions of theprison boom has obliterated the fact thatinmates arerst and foremost poor people.

Indeed, this monotonic class recruitmentis a constant of penal history since the



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invention of houses of correction in thelate sixteenth century27 and a fact con-rmed by the annals of U.S. incarcera-tion.28 Consider the social prole of theclientele of the nations jailsthe gate-way into Americas carceral archipelago.This clientele is drawn overwhelminglyfrom the most precarious fractions of theurban working class29: fewer than halfof inmates held a full-time job at the timeof arraignment and two-thirds issue fromhouseholds with an annual income com-ing to less than halfthe poverty line;only 13 percent have some postsecondaryeducation (compared to a national rateabove one-half ); 60 percent did not growup with both parents, including 14 per-cent raised in foster homes or orphan-ages; and every other detainee has hada member of his family behind bars. Theregular clients of Americas jails sufferfrom acute material insecurity, culturaldeprivation, and social denudementonly 16 percent of them are married,compared to 58 percent for men of their

age bracket nationwide. They also includedisproportionate numbers of the home-less, the mentally ill, the alcohol- anddrug-addicted, and the severely handi-capped: nearly one in four suffers from aphysical, psychic, or emotional ailmentserious enough to hamper his or herability to work. And they come mostlyfrom deprived and stigmatized neigh-borhoods that have been devastated by

the double retrenchment of the formallabor market and the welfare state fromthe urban core.30 Conversely, very fewmembers of the middle and upper classesever sojourn at the Graybar hotel, es-pecially for committing the minor tomiddling crimes that account for thebulk of prison convictions. (In 1997, 11percent of new court commitments tostate penitentiaries were for public order

offenses, 30 percent for narcotics convic-tions, and 28 percent for property crimes.)

Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff arebut spectacular exceptions that spotlightthis stringent class rule.

Race comes second. But the ethnictransformation of Americas prison hasbeen at once more dramatic and morepuzzling than generally recognized. Tostart, the ethnoracial makeup of convictshas completelyflip-floppedin four decades,turning over from 70 percent white and30 percent others at the close of WorldWar II to 70 percent African Americanand Latino versus 30 percent white bycenturys end. This inversion, which ac-celerated after the mid-1970s, is all themore stunning when the criminal popu-lation has both shrunk and becomewhiterduring that period: the share of AfricanAmericans among individuals arrested bythe police for the four most serious vio-lent offenses (murder, rape, robbery, andaggravated assault) dropped from 51 per-cent in 1973 to 43 percent in 1996,31 and itcontinued to decline steadily for each ofthose four crimes until at least 2006.32

Next, the rapid blackening of theprison population even as serious crimewhitened is due exclusively to the astro-nomical increase in the incarcerationrates of lower-class African Americans.In his bookPunishment and Inequality in

America, sociologist Bruce Western pro-duces a stunning statistic: whereas thecumulative risk of imprisonment forAfrican American males without a high-

school diploma tripled between 1979 and1999, to reach the astonishing rate of 59percent, the lifetime chance of servingtime for African American men withsome college education decreasedfrom 6percent to 5 percent.33 Here again, themedia melodrama around the arrest ofHarvard University star professor HenryLouis Gates in Summer 2009 has hiddenthe fact that middle- and upper-class Afri-

can Americans are better offunder thepresent penal regime than they were thir-



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ty years ago. It has played to the nationalobsession for the black-white duality,which obfuscates the fact that class dis-

proportionality inside each ethnic categoryis greater than the racial disproportionalitybetween them: African American menare eight times more likely to sojournbehind bars than European Americanmen (7.9 percent versus 1.0 percent in2000), but the lifetime probability ofserving time in prison for AfricanAmerican males who did not com-plete their secondary education istwelve times that for African Amer-ican males who went to college (58.9percent versus 4.9 percent), whereasthat class gap among white men standsat sixteen to one (11.2 percent versus0.7 percent).34 The fact that these ra-tios were considerably lower two de-cades ago for both African Americansand European Americans (of the orderof one to three and one to eight, respec-tively) conrms that enlarged imprison-ment has struck very selectively by class

inside of race, which again refutes thediagnosis of a mass phenomenon.

How was such double, nested selec-tivity achieved? How is it possible thatcriminal laws ostensibly written toavoid class and color bias would leadto throwing so many (sub)proletarianAfrican American men under lock, andnot other African American men?35

The class gradient in racialized impris-onment was obtained by targeting oneparticular place: the remnants of the dark

ghetto. I insist here on the word remnants,because the ghetto of old, which held inits grip a unied, if stratied, AfricanAmerican community, is no more. Thecommunal Black Belt of the Fordist era,described by a long lineage of distin-guished African American sociologists,

from W. E. B. Du Bois and E. FranklinFrazier to Drake and Cayton to Kenneth

Clark, imploded in the 1960s, to be re-placed by a dual and decentered struc-ture of seclusion composed of a degrad-ed hyperghetto doubly segregated by raceand class, on the one hand, and thesatel-lite African American middle-class districtsthat mushroomed in the adjacent areasvacated by the mass exodus of whitesto the suburbs, on the other.36

But to detect the tightening linkagebetween the decaying ghetto and thebooming prison requires that one ef-fects two analytic moves. First, onemust break out of the narrow ambitof the crime and punishment para-digm that continues to hamstring thescholarly and policy debate, in spiteof its increasingly glaring inadequacy.A simple ratio sufces to demonstratethat crime cannot be the cause behindcarceral hyperinflation: the numberof clients of state and federal prisonsboomed from 21 convicts per thousandindex crimes in 1975 to 125 per thou-sand in 2005. In other words, holding

the crime rate constant shows that theAmerican penal state is six times morepunitive today than it was three decadesago.37 Instead of getting sidetracked intoinvestigations of the crime-punishment(dis)connection, one must recognize thatthe prison is not a mere technical imple-ment of government designed to stemoffending, but a core state capacity de-voted to managing dispossessed and dis-

honored populations. Returning to theearly history of the prison in the longsixteenth century readily discloses thatpenal bondage developed, not to ghtcrime, but to dramatize the authorityof rulers, and to repress idleness andenforce morality among vagrants, beg-gars, and assorted categories cast adriftby the advent of capitalism.38 The riseof the prison was part and parcel of the

building of the early modern state todiscipline the nascent urban proletariat



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and to stage sovereignty for the benetof the emerging citizenry. The same istrue four centuries later in the dualizingmetropolis of neoliberal capitalism.39

A second analytic shift is needed toferret out the causal connection betweenhyperghettoization and hyperincarcera-tion: to realize that the ghetto is not asegregated quarter, a poor neighborhood,or an urban district marred by housingdilapidation, violence, vice, or disrepute,but an instrument of ethnoracial control inthe city. Another return to social historydemonstrates that a ghetto is a sociospa-tial contraption through which a domi-nant ethnic category secludes a subordi-nate group and restricts its life chances inorder to both exploit and exclude it fromthe life-sphere of the dominant. Like the

Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Europe, theBlack Belt of the American metropolis inthe Fordist age combined four elements

stigma, constraint, spatial connement,and institutional encasementto permitthe economic extraction and social ostra-

cization of a population deemed congen-itally inferior, deled and deling by vir-tue of its lineal connection to bondage.Succeeding chattel slavery and Jim Crow,the ghetto was the third peculiar institu-tion entrusted with dening, conning,and controlling African Americans in theurban industrial order.40

Penal expansion after the mid-1970s isa political response to the collapse of the

ghetto. But why did the ghetto collapse?Three causal series converged to under-cut the black city within the white thathemmed in African Americans from the1920s to the 1960s. The rst is the post-industrial economic transition that shift-ed employment from manufacturing toservices, from central city to suburb, andfrom the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt and low-wage foreign countries. Together with re-

newed immigration, this shift made Afri-can American workers redundant and

undercut the role of the ghetto as a reser-voir of unskilled labor. The second causeis the political displacement provoked bythe Great White Migration to the sub-urbs: from the 1950s to the 1970s, millionsof white families fled the metropolis inreaction to the influx of African Ameri-cans from the rural South. This demo-graphic upheaval, subsidized by the fed-eral government and bolstered by thecourts, weakened cities in the nationalelectoral system and reduced the politicalpull of African Americans. The third forcebehind the breakdown of the ghetto asethnoracial container is African Ameri-can protest, fostered by the accumulationof social and symbolic capital correlativeof ghettoization, culminating with thecivil rights legislation, the budding ofBlack Power activism, and the eruptionof urban riots that rocked the countrybetween 1964 and 1968.

Unlike Jim Crow, then, the ghetto wasnot dismantled by forceful governmentaction. It was left to crumble onto itself,

trapping lower-class African Americansin a vortex of unemployment, poverty,and crime abetted by the joint withdrawalof the wage-labor market and the welfarestate, while the growing African Ameri-can middle class achieved limited socialand spatial separation by colonizing thedistricts adjacent to the historic BlackBelt.41 As the ghetto lost its economicfunction of labor extraction and proved

unable to ensure ethnoracial closure, theprison was called on to help contain adishonored population widely viewed asdeviant, destitute, and dangerous. Thiscoupling occurred because, as previouslysuggested, ghetto and prison belong tothe same organizational genus, namely,institutions of forced connement: the ghettois a sort of ethnoracial prison in thecity, while the prison functions in the

manner of a judicial ghetto at large.Both are charged with enfolding a stig-



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matized category so as to defuse the ma-terial and/or symbolic threat it poses forthe broader society from which it hasbeen extruded.

To be sure, the structural homologyand functional surrogacy of ghetto andprison do not mandate that the formerbe replaced by or coupled with the lat-ter. For that to happen, specic policychoices had to be made, implemented,and supported. This support sprang fromthe fearful reaction of whites to the ur-ban riots and related racial upheavals ofthe 1960s and from the rising politicalresentment generated by governmentpowerlessness in the face of the stagfla-tion of 1970s and the subsequent spreadof social insecurity along three tacks.First, middle-class whites acceleratedtheir exodus out of the capsizing cities,which enabled the federal governmentto dismantle programs essential to thesuccor of inner-city residents. Second,working-class whites joined their mid-dle-class brethren in turning against the

welfare state to demand that public aidbe curtailedleading to the end of wel-fare as we know it in 1996. Third, whitesacross the class spectrum allied to offerardent political backing for the law andorder measures that primed the penalpump and harnessed it to the hyperghet-to. The meeting ground and theater ofthese three political thrusts was the re-vanchist city42 in which increasing in-

equality, diffusing social precariousness,and festering marginality fed citizensrancor over the alleged excessive gener-osity of welfare and leniency of criminal

justice toward poor African Americans.Two trains of converging changes then

bolstered the knitting of the hyperghettoand the prison into a carceral mesh en-snaring a population of lower-class Afri-can Americans rejected by the deregulat-

ed labor market and the dereliction ofpublic institutions in the inner city.43

On the one side, the ghetto was prisonizedas its class composition became monoto-nously poor, its internal social relationsgrew stamped by distrust and fear, and itsindigenous organizations waned to be re-placed by the social control institutionsof the state. On the other side, the prison

was ghettoized as rigid racial partitioncame to pervade custodial facilities; thepredatory culture of the street supplant-ed the convict code that had tradition-ally organized the inmate society44;rehabilitation was abandoned in favor ofneutralization; and the stigma of criminalconviction was deepened and diffused inways that make it akin to racial dishonor.The resulting symbiosis between hyper-ghetto and prison not only perpetuatesthe socioeconomic marginality and sym-bolic taint of the African American sub-proletariat, feeding the runaway growthof the carceral system. It also plays a keyrole in the revamping of race by asso-ciating blackness with devious violenceand dangerousness,45 the redenition of

the citizenry via the production of a ra-cialized public culture of vilication ofcriminals, and the construction of a post-Keynesian state that replaces the social-welfare treatment of poverty with itspunitive containment.

Yet the tightening nexus between thehyperghetto and the prison does not tellthe whole story of the frenetic growth ofthe penal institution in America after thecivil rights revolution. InPunishing the

Poor, I show that the unleashing of a vo-racious prison apparatus after the mid-1970s partakes of a broader restructur-ing of the state tending to criminalizepoverty and its consequences so as toimpress insecure, underpaid jobs as themodal employment situation of the un-skilled segments of the postindustrial

proletariat. The sudden hypertrophy ofthe penal state was thus matched and



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complemented by the planned atrophyof the social state, culminating with the1996 law on Personal Responsibility andWork Opportunity, which replaced theright to welfare with the obligationof workfare. Each in its fashion, work-fare and prisonfare respond, not justto the crisis of the ghetto as a devicefor the sociospatial seclusion of Afri-can Americans, but to the repudiationof the Fordist wage-work compact andof the Keynesian social compromise ofthe postwar decades. Together, they en-snare the marginal populations of themetropolis in a carceral-assistential netdesigned to steer them toward dereg-ulated employment through moral re-training and material suasion and, ifthey prove too recalcitrant and disrup-tive, to warehouse them in the devas-tated core of the urban Black Belt andin the penitentiaries that have becomeits distant yet direct satellites.

The workfare revolution and the penalexplosion are the two sides of the same

historical coin, two facets of the reengi-neering and masculinizing of the state onthe way to the establishment of a novelpolitical regime that may be character-ized as liberal-paternalist: it practiceslaissez-faire at the top, toward corpo-rations and the privileged, but it is in-trusive and disciplinary at the bottom,when it comes to dealing with the con-squences of social disinvestment and

economic deregulation for the lowerclass and its territories. And, just as ra-cial stigma was pivotal to the junctionof hyperghetto and prison, the taint ofblackness was epicentral to the re-strictive and punitive overhaul of socialwelfare at centurys end. In the wake ofthe ghetto mutinies of the 1960s, thediffusion of blackened images of crimefueled rising hostility toward criminals

and fostered (white) demands for expan-sive prison policies narrowly aimed at ret-

ribution and neutralization.46 Duringthe same years, the spread of blackenedimages of urban destitution and depen-dency similarly fostered mounting re-sentment toward public aid, bolstering(white) support for restrictive welfaremeasures centered on deterrence andcompulsion.47 Race turns out to be thesymbolic linchpin that coordinatedthe synergistic transformation of thesetwo sectors of public policy toward thepoor.48

Again, like the joining of hyperghettoand prison, this second institutional pair-ing feeding carceral growth can be betterunderstood by paying attention to thestructural, functional, and cultural simi-larities between workfare and prisonfareas people-processing organizations49

targeted on problem populations andneighborhoods. It was tightened by thetransformation of welfare in a punitivedirection and by the expansion of the pe-nal system to treat more and more ofthe traditional clientele of welfare. Both

programs of state action are narrowlydirected at the bottom of the class andethnic hierarchy; both effectively assumethat their recipients are guilty until pro-ven innocent and that their conductmust be closely supervised as well asrectied by restrictive and coercive mea-sures; and both use deterrence and stig-ma to achieve behavioral modication.

In the era of hypermobile capital and

fragmented wage-work, the monitoringof the precarious segments of the work-ing class is no longer handled solely bythe maternal social arm of the welfarestate, as portrayed by Frances Fox Pivenand Richard Cloward in their classic 1971studyRegulating the Poor.50 It entails adouble regulation through the virile andcontrolling arms ofworkfare and prisonfareacting in unison. This dynamic coupling of

social and penal policy at the bottom ofthe class and ethnic structure operates



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through a familiar division of labor be-tween the sexes: the public aid bureau-cracy, reconverted into an administra-tive springboard to subpoverty employ-ment, takes up the task of inculcatingthe duty of working for works sake topoor women (and indirectly to their chil-dren), while the penal quartet formed bythe police, the court, the prison, and theprobation or parole ofcer shoulders themission of taming their menthat is, theboyfriends or husbands, brothers, andsons of these poor women. Welfare pro-vision and criminal justice are animatedby the same punitive and paternalist phi-losophy that stresses the individual re-sponsibility of the client; they bothrely on case supervision and bureaucraticsurveillance, deterrence and stigma, andgraduated sanctions aimed at modifyingbehavior to enforce compliance withwork and civility; and they reach pub-lics of roughly comparable size. In 2001,2.1 million households received Tempo-rary Assistance to Needy Families, for

a total of some 6 million beneciaries,while the carceral population topped2.1 million and the stock under criminal

justice supervision surpassed 6.5 million.In addition, welfare recipients and in-

mates have nearly identical social prolesand extensive mutual ties of descent andalliance conrming that they are the twogendered components of the same popu-lation. Both categories live below 50 per-

cent of the federal poverty line (for one-half and two-thirds of them, respective-ly); both are disproportionately AfricanAmerican and Hispanic (37 percent and18 percent versus 41 percent and 19 per-cent); the majority did not nish highschool; and many suffer from seriousphysical and mental disabilities limitingtheir workforce participation (44 percentof afdc mothers as against 37 percent of

jail inmates). And they are closely boundto one another by kin and marital and

social bonds, reside overwhelmingly inthe same impoverished households andbarren neighborhoods, and face thesame bleak life horizon at the bottomof the class and ethnic structure. Thisintertwinement indicates that we cannothope to untie the knot of class, race, andimprisonment, and thus explain hyper-incarceration, if we do not relink prison-fare and workfare, which in turn impliesthat we must bring the social wing of thestate and its transformations into ouranalytic and policy purview.

Revanchism as public policy toward

the dispossessed has thrust the countryinto a historical cul-de-sac, as the dou-ble coupling of hyperghettoization andhyperincarceration, on the one hand, andworkfare and prisonfare, on the other,damages both society and the state. Forsociety, the spiral of penal escalation hasbecome self-reinforcing as well as self-defeating: the carceral Moloch activelydestabilizes the precarious fractions ofthe postindustrial proletariat it strikeswith special zeal, truncates the life op-tions of its members, and further despoilsinner-city neighborhoods, thereby re-producing the very social disorders, ma-terial insecurity, and symbolic stain it issupposed to alleviate. As a result, the pop-ulation behind bars has kept on growingeven as the overall crime rate droppedprecipitously for some fteen years, yield-ing a paradoxical pattern of carceral levi-tation. For the state, the penalization ofpoverty turns out to be nancially ruin-ous, as it competes with, and eventuallyconsumes, the funds and staff needed tosustain essential public services such asschooling, health, transportation, andsocial protection.51 Moreover, the pu-nitive and panoptic logic that propelscriminal justice seeps into and erodes

the shielding capacities of the welfaresector, for instance by inflecting the



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practices of child protective servicesin ways that turn them into adjuncts ofthe penal apparatus.52 It similarly un-dercuts the educational springboard,as depleted inner-city schools serving aclientele roiled by mass unemploymentand penal disruption come to prioritizeand manage issues of student disciplinethrough a prism of crime control.53 Last-ly, the law-and-order guignol diverts theattention of elected ofcials and saps theenergy of bureaucratic managers chargedwith handling the problem populationsand territories of the dualizing city.

If the diagnosis of the rise of the penalstate in America sketched here is correct,and hyperincarceration proceeding alongsteep gradients of class, race, and space

rather than mass incarcerationis theoffshoot of a novel government of socialinsecurity installed to absorb the shockof the crash of the ghetto and normalizeprecarious wage labor, then policiesaimed at shrinking the carceral statemust effectively reverse revanchism. They

must go well beyond criminal justice re-form to encompass the gamut of govern-ment programs that collectively set thelife chances of the poor, and whose con-current turnaround toward restrictionand discipline after the mid-1970s haveboosted the incidence, intensity, and dur-ation of marginality at the bottom of theclass and ethnic order.54

A variety of cogent proposals for re-

ducing Americas overreliance on con-nement to check the reverberations ofurban dispossession and dishonor havebeen put forward on the penal front overthe past decade.55 These proposals rangefrom the renewal of intermediate sanc-tions, the diversion of low-level drug of-fenders, the abolition of mandatory sen-tencing, and the generalized reduction ofthe length of prison terms, to the reform

of parole revocation, the incorporationof scal and social impacts into judicial

proceedings, and the promotion of re-storative justice. Whatever the technicalmeans chosen, achieving sustained car-ceral deflation will require insulating

judicial and correctional professionalsfrom the converging pressures of themedia and politicians, and rehabilitatingrehabilitation through a public campaigndebunking the neoconservative myththat nothing works when it comes toreforming offenders.56

Deep and broad justice reform is ur-gently needed to reduce the astronomicalnancial costs, skewed social and admin-istrative burdens, and rippling crimino-genic effects of continued hyperincarcer-ation. But generic measures to diminishthe size and reach of the prison acrossthe board will leave largely untouchedthe sprouting epicenter of carceralgrowththat is, the urban wastelandswhere race, class, and the penal statemeet and meshunless they are com-bined with a concerted attack on labordegradation and social desolation in the

decaying hyperghetto. For that to hap-pen, the downsizing of the penal wingmust be accompanied by the reconstruc-tion of the economic and social capaci-ties of the state and by their active de-ployment in and around the devastateddistricts of the segregated metropolis.The programmed dereliction of publicinstitutions in the inner city must beremedied through massive investment

in schools, social services, health care,and unfettered access to drug and alco-hol rehabilitation. A Works ProgressAdministration-style public works pro-gram aimed at the vestiges of the historicBlack Belt would help at once to rebuildits decrepit infrastructure, to improvehousing conditions, and to offer eco-nomic sustenance and civic incorpora-tion to local residents.57

In sum, the diagnosis of hyperincarcer-ation implies that puncturing Americas



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bloated and voracious penal state willtake more than a full-bore political com-mitment to ghting social inequality andethnic marginality through progressiveand inclusive government programs onthe economic, social, and justice fronts.

It will necessitate also a spatially targetedpolicy to break the noxious nexus nowbinding hyperghettoization, restrictiveworkfare, and expansive prisonfare inthe racialized urban core.

endnotes

1 Michael B. Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate: Views from History (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton University Press, 1995); Alice OConnor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy,and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,2002).

2 See Neil Smith for a stimulating discussion of the notion of revanche as an extended andmultiform visceral reaction in the public discourse against the liberalism of the post-1960s period and an all-out attack on the social policy structure that emanated from theNew Deal and the immediate postwar era; Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentri-cation and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 42. See also Michael Flammfor a painstaking account of how the conflation of racial tumult, antiwar protest, civildisorder, and street crime laid the social foundation for the political demand for lawand order in the wake of the class and racial dislocations of the 1960s; Michael W.Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

3 Loc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (Cambridge: PolityPress, 2010).

4 Loc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham,N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

5 Glenn C. Loury, Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration, and American Values, Tanner Lec-tures on Human Values, Stanford University, April 46, 2007. A revised version is includ-ed in Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loc Wacquant, Race, In-carceration, and American Values (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2008).

6 Wacquant,Punishing the Poor, chap. 45.

7 Frieder Dnkel and Sonja Snacken, Les Prisons en Europe (Paris: LHarmattan, 2005).

8 Wacquant,Punishing the Poor, 262263, 121125. The spiteful tenor of Giulianis cam-paign of class cleansing of the streets and its strident racial overtones are captured byNeil Smith, Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s, Social Text 57 (Winter 1998): 120.

9

The sheer scale of American jails puts them in a class of their own. In 2000, the threelargest custodial complexes in the Western worldwere the jails of Los Angeles (23,000 in-mates), New York (18,000), and Chicago (10,000). By contrast, the largest penitentiarycenter in Europe, the Fleury-Mrogis prison just south of Paris, held 3,900 and is consid-ered grotesquely oversized by European standards.

10 The last close-up study of the daily functioning of a big-city jail and its impact on theurban poor, John Irwins ne ethnography of San Franciscos jail, dates from thirty yearsago. See John Irwin, The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1985).

11Joan Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003).

12 The national dna database from crime scenes, persons known to the police, and (for-mer) convicts compiled by the fbi (under the Combined dna Index System [codis]



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program) more than doubled over the past ve years alone to reach eight million offenderproles. Its explosive expansion, fed by technological innovation and organizational im-peratives, is springing a new racialized dragnet thrown primarily at lower-class AfricanAmerican men due to their massive overrepresentation among persons stopped by police;Troy Duster, The Exponential Growth of National and State dnaDatabases: Cold Hits

and a Newly Combustible Intersection of Genomics, Forensics and Race, paper presentedto the cssi, University of California, Berkeley, February 24, 2010.

13 Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chica-go: University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Thacher, The Rise of Criminal BackgroundScreening in Rental Housing, Law & Social Inquiry 31 (1) (2008): 530; Richard Tewksburyand Matthew B. Lees, Sex Offenders on Campus: University-Based Sex Offender Regis-tries and the Collateral Consequences of Registration, Federal Probation 70 (3) (2006):5057. For an extended analysis of ramifying penal disabilities outside of prison walls,see Megan L. Comfort, Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender, Annual Review of Lawand Social Science 3 (2007): 271296.

14 Kathleen M. Olivares, Velmer S. Burton, Jr., and Francis T. Cullen, Collateral Conse-quences of a Felony Conviction: A National Study of State Legal Codes Ten Year Later,Federal Probation 60 (3) (1996): 1017.

15 Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, The Scale of Imprisonment (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1991); Michael Tonry, Fragmentation of Sentencing and Correctionsin America, Alternatives to Incarceration 6 (2): 913.

16 Vanessa Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the WayAmerica Punishes Offenders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

17 David F. Greenberg and Valerie West, State Prison Populations and Their Growth,19711991, Criminology 39 (1) (2001): 615654; David Jacobs and Jason T. Carmichael,Politics of Punishment across Time and Space: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis of Im-prisonment Rates, Social Forces 80 (1) (2001): 6189. But see Kevin B. Smith, The Pol-

itics of Punishment: Evaluating Political Explanations of Incarceration Rates, The Jour-nal of Politics 66 (3) (2004): 925938.

18 Franklin E. Zimring and David T. Johnson, Public Opinion and the Governance of Pun-ishment in Democratic Political Systems, The Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science 605 (2006): 265280.

19 Nancy E. Marion and Willard M. Oliver, Congress, Crime, and Budgetary Responsive-ness: A Study in Symbolic Politics, Criminal Justice Policy Review 20 (2) (2009): 115135.

20 Lisa L. Miller, The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime Control (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2008).

21 The war on crimewith its constituent imagery that melded the burning cities of the

1960s urban riots with the face of [Willie] Horton as (every) black man, murderer, rapistof a white womanremade party afliations and then remade the parties themselves, asthe war came to be embraced and stridently promoted by Republicans and Democratsalike; Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney-Lpez, and Jonathan Simon, eds., After theWar on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction (New York: New York Univer-sity Press, 2008), 7.

22 See, for example, Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Prots FromCrime (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Paul Wright and Tara Herivel, eds., Prison Nation:The Warehousing of Americas Poor(New York: Routledge, 2003); Michael Jacobson, Down-sizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration (New York: New York Uni-versity Press, 2005); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of MassIncarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Todd R.

Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighbor-hoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).



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23 David Garland, ed., Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (London: Sage,2001). Ironically, the generalized notion was rst broached, not in the U.S. prison debate,but in Western Europe by the French justice ofcial and scholar Jean-Paul Jean in a discus-sion of the mass incarceration of drug addicts in Frances jails; Jean-Paul Jean, Mettren lincarcration de masse des toxicomanes, Esprit 10 (1995): 130131. (I used the term

myself in several publications between 1997 and 2005, so this conceptual revision is in parta self-critique.)

24 Diane E. Bennett et al., Prevalence of Tuberculosis Infection in the United States Popu-lation: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 19992000, AmericanJournal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 177 (2008): 348355; Bridget F. Grant et al.,The 12-month Prevalence and Trends in dsm-iv Alcohol Abuse and Dependence: Unit-ed States, 19911992 and 20012002, Alcohol Research & Health 74 (3) (2004): 223234.

25 To be sure, David Garland singles out two esssential features that dene mass incarcer-ation: sheer numbers (that is, a rate of imprisonment and a size of prison populationthat is markedly above the historical and comparative norm for societies of this type) andthe social concentration of mass imprisonments effects (when it becomes the impris-onment of whole groups of the population, in this case young black males in large urbancenters); Garland, Mass Imprisonment, 56. But it is not clear why the rst property wouldnot sufce to characterize the phenomenon, nor what markedly above entails. Next,there is a logical contradiction between the two features of mass reach and concentratedimpact (no other mass phenomenon benets a narrow and well-bounded population).Lastly, Bernard Harcourt has pointed out that the United States had rates of forcible cus-tody exceeding 600 per 100,000 residents from 1938 to 1962, if statistics on penal conne-ment and mental asylums are merged; Bernard Harcourt, From the Asylum to the Prison:Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution, Texas Law Review 84 (2006): 17511786. Thesedenitional troubles suggest that the mass characterization is an ad hoc designation craftedinductively to suit the peculiarities of U.S. incarceration trends at the twentieth centurysclose (as Garland observes, a new name to describe an altogether new phenomenon).

26 The martial trope of the war on crime has similarly hindered the analysis of the trans-formation and workings of criminal policy. This belligerent designationespoused byadvocates and critics of enlarged incarceration alikeis triply misleading: it passes civil-ian measures aimed at citizens for a military campaign against foreign foes; it purports toght crime generically when it targets a narrow strand of illegalities (street offenses inthe segregated lower-class districts of the city); and it abstracts the criminal justice wingfrom the broader revamping of the state entailing the simultaneous restriction of welfareand expansion of prisonfare.

27 Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in EarlyModern Europe (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

28 David Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic

(New York: Aldine, 1971); Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: Five Hundred Years ofImprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). The only excep-tions to this class rule are the periods and countries in which the prison is used extensive-ly as an instrument of political repression; Aryeh Neier, Conning Dissent: The Politi-cal Prison, in The Oxford History of Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society,ed. Norval Morris and David Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),350380.

29 Wacquant,Punishing the Poor, chap. 2.

30 William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor(New York:Knopf, 1996); Loc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Margin-ality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).

31 Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Class, and Punishment in America (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995), 17.



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32 Michael Tonry and Matthew Melewski, The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime ControlPolicies on Black Americans, Crime & Justice 37 (2008): 18.

33 Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,2006), 27.

34 Cf. ibid., 17, 27.

35 Lower-class African American women come next as the category with the fastest increasein incarceration over the past two decades, leading to more African American females beingunder lock than there are total women conned in all of Western Europe. But their capturecomes largely as a by-product of the aggressive rolling out of penal policies aimed primar-ily at their lovers, kin, and neighbors. (Men make up 94 percent of all convicts in the nation.)In any case, the number of female inmates pales before the ranks of the millions of girl-friends and wives of convicts who are subjected to secondary prisonization due to the

judicial status of their partner; Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family inthe Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

36 Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 117118.

37 The increase of this index of punitiveness is 299 percent for violent crimes as comparedwith 495 percent for index crimes (aggregating violent crime and the major categories ofproperty crime), conrming that the penal state has grown especially more severe towardlesser offenses and thus connes many more marginal delinquents than in the past.

38 Georg Rusche and Otto Kirscheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New Bruns-wick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2003); Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalismin Pre-Industrial Europe (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); Spierenburg,The Prison Experience.

39 Loc Wacquant, Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare and Social Insecuri-ty, Sociological Forum 25 (2) (2010): 197220.

40 Loc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh, Punish-

ment & Society 3 (1) (2001): 95133.41 Wilson, When Work Disappears; Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril

among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

42 Smith, The New Urban Frontier.

43 Wacquant,Deadly Symbiosis, chap. 3.

44 Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study in a Maximum Security Prison (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).

45 Loc Wacquant, Race as Civic Felony, International Social Science Journal 181 (Spring2005): 127142.

46John Irwin, Prisons in Turmoil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980).47 Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);

Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds., Race and the Politics of WelfareReform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

48 In the media and policy debates leading up to the 1996 termination of welfare, three racial-ized gures offered lurid incarnations of dependency: the flamboyant and wily welfarequeen, the immature and irresponsible teenage mother, and the aimless and joblessdeadbeat dad. All three were stereotypically portrayed as African American residents ofthe dilapidated inner city.

49 Yeheskel Hasenfeld, People Processing Organizations: An Exchange Approach, AmericanSociological Review 37 (3) (1972): 256263.

50 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Wel-fare, expanded edition (New York: Vintage, 1993; rst published in 1971).



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51 This is well illustrated by the current predicament of California, a state that employs moreprison guards than it does social workers: it just slashed its higher education budgets andincreased college tuition by 30 percent in response to a decit of $20 billion in 2009, whenit spends an extravagant $10 billion on corrections (more than its yearly outlay for univer-sities for fteen years running). The state now faces a stark choice between sending its

children to college or continuing to throw masses of minor offenders behind bars forbrutally long terms.

52 Dorothy E. Roberts, Criminal Justice and Black Families: The Collateral Damage of Over-enforcement, U.C. Davis Law Review 34 (2000): 10051028.

53 Paul J. Hirscheld, Preparing for Prison? The Criminalization of School Discipline in theusa, Theoretical Criminology 12 (1) (February 2008 ): 79101.

54 Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 6991, 280287.

55 Michael Tonry, ed., Penal Reform in Overcrowded Times (New York: Oxford University Press,2001); Dorothy E. Roberts, The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in AfricanAmerican Communities, Stanford Law Review 56 (5) (2004): 12711305; Jacobson, Down-sizing Prisons; Marie Gottschalk, Dismantling the Carceral State: The Future of PenalPolicy Reform, Texas Law Review 84 (2005): 16931750; Marc Mauer and the SentencingProject, Race to Incarcerate, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2006); James Austin and ToddR. Clear, Reducing Mass Incarceration: Implications of the Iron Law of Prison Popula-tions,Harvard Law & Policy Review 3 (2007): 307324.

56 Contrary to the dominant public vision, research has consistently shown the superior-ity of rehabilitation over retribution. Supervision and sanctions, at best, show mod-est mean reductions in recidivism and, in some instances, have the opposite effect andincrease reoffense rates. The mean recidivism effects found in studies of rehabilitationtreatment, by comparison, are consistently positive and relatively large; Mark W. Lip-sey and Francis T. Cullen, The Effectiveness of Correctional Rehabilitation: A Reviewof Systematic Reviews, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 297320. That

hardened criminals do change and turn their lives around is shown by Shadd Maruna,Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, D.C.: Ameri-can Psychological Association, 2001); that even lifers imprisoned for homicide ndpathways to redemption is demonstrated by John Irwin, Lifers: Seeking Redemption inPrison (New York: Routledge, 2009).

57 See the powerful arguments of Mary Pattillo for immediately investing in poor black neigh-borhoods as is, instead of pursuing long-term strategies of dispersal or mixing that areboth inefcient and detrimental to the pressing needs and distinct interests of the urbanminority poor; Mary Pattillo, Investing in Poor Black Neighborhoods As Is, in Legacyof Racial Discrimination and Segregation in Public Housing, ed. Margery Turner, Susan Popkin,and Lynette Rawlings (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2008), 3146.


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