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Neoliberalism In John Wacquant's Leviathan

1045 Words5 Pages

WEEK # 5
• What is Neoliberalism
Wacquant describes for the reader the neoliberal state as one that is inherently penal, developing “punitive containment” (Wacquant, 2010, p. 198).as a government technique for managing deepening urban marginality. In his “Leviathan” state he suggests most socially and economically marginalized classes are controlled through a mixture of prisonfare and workfare. One of the keys in his definition is the use of prisonfare to warehouse permanently unemployed sections of the society, thereby penalizing, warehousing, and locking up poverty. On the other front is workfare which is viewed as welfare that is contingent upon job seeking at substandard wages. Wacquant uses the definitions to translate economic injustice …show more content…

Simply put, those who are not playing by the rules of the white rich do not deserve public assistance. He contrasts this new regime as contrasting social and criminal insecurity. He suggests that the growth of the prison industry in the United States is a political response, not to secure against rising criminal insecurity, but to combat social insecurity. This social insecurity is brought about by the, “fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of ethnic hierarchy” (Wacquant, 2010, p. 198). He asserts the use of workfare and prisonfare are the means for society to control the urban disorders spawned by economic deregulation and to discipline the disobedient sectors of the working …show more content…

masculine state, wielding incarceration, behavior regulation, and strict law enforcement penalties. This leads to a, “double regulation of poverty by the joint action of punitive welfare turned-workfare and an aggressive penal bureaucracy” (Wacquant, 2010, p. 202). This falls directly of shoulders of the marginalized, impoverished, inner-city, black neighborhoods. Wacquant wraps this into his description of today’s penial policy in the US that is more interested in punitive practices focused on locking up the poor and warehousing them and not rehabilitating convicts and changing their behavior. This effectively confines the marginalized into isolated neighborhoods, making them invisible, and reducing the likelihood they will pose a threat on

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