Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality

by Loïc Wacquant, 2007

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience

of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during

the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality.

This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical

or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as

they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the

functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and

global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing

city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto

and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights

three distinctive spatial properties of ‘advanced marginality’ – territorial fixation

and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of ‘place’, and the loss

of a hinterland – and draws out their implications for the formation of the

‘precariat’ in postindustrial societies.

From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US

by Loïc Wacquant, New Left Review, 2002

Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States. The first is chattel slavery as the pivot of the plantation economy and inceptive matrix of racial division from the colonial era to the Civil War. The second is the Jim Crow system of legally enforced discrimination and segregation from cradle to grave that anchored the predominantly agrarian society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third special device for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis is the ghetto, corresponding to the conjoint urbanization and proletarianization of African-Americans from the Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partially obsolete by the concurrent transformation of economy and state and by the mounting protest of blacks against continued caste exclusion, climaxing with the explosive urban riots chronicled in the Kerner Commission Report. [1]

The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

Loïc Wacquant, Open Democracy

How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path toward extinction? In my book Punishing the Poor, I make three arguments to resolve this historical conundrum. First, the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity caused by the casualisation of wage labor and the disruption of ethno-racial hierarchy. Second, we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. Third, the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prison fare” partake of the forging of the neoliberal state.