Autorentext

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris.

Klappentext

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.

Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper penality" and "street penality."

Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.

Inhalt

A Genealogical Sketch

Overture: On Punishment, the State and Citizenship
The criminal as anti-citizen
The many faces and functions of penality
A historicist-analytical approach

1. Penality as Core State Capacity and Negative Sociodicy
   Punishment and social structure revisited
   Punishment and the state: the puzzle of mutual ignorance
   Durkheim, Rusche and Foucault on penality: passion, labor, disciplines
   Reformation versus retribution: meshing philosophies of punishment
   Weber, Mann and Scott on the state: force, penetration, legibility
   The three states of Pierre Bourdieu
   Bourdieu 1, penality in the bureaucratic field
   Bourdieu 2, Right hand and Left hand
   Bourdieu 3, symbolic capital and negative sociodicy
   Three structural properties of the penal state

2. Marginality, Ethnicity, Territory
   The stunning return of the prison
   Penalization as neoliberal statecraft
   Lessons from social history: marginality floods the city
   Province of the precariat: class and ethnicity behind bars
   Managing marginality by targeting territory
   Structural osmosis
   'Paper penality' versus 'street penality'
   Historical excursus: colonial penality and the urban badlands
   The penal triad in the tropics
   Bringing unruly bodies to heel, or indigénat at work
   Special punishment in neighborhoods of relegation

3. Penal Power Incarnate: A Day in the Life of a Prosecutor
   A structural ethnography of prosecutorial practice
   Situating the pretrial prosecutor
   'The Professor' comes to court
   Anatomy of the local judicial field
   A day in the life
   'Down in the trenches'
   The splintering of punishment across class fractions
   A cautionary note on race and prosecution
   Judicial tagging and relational contracting
   The human spear of the state

Coda: The Parable of Marx's Hangman and the Aporias of Abolitionism
Urban marginality, penal policy and social rights
Abolitionism as penal millenarism
The ten tenets of radical penal minimalism
Penal transformation and the 'ethic of responsibility'