Analyze

The single greatest political transforma- tion of the post-civil rights era in Ameri- ca is the joint rolling back of the stingy social state and rolling out of the gargan- tuan penal state that have remade the country’s strati½cation, cities, and civic culture, and are recasting the very char- acter of “blackness” itself. Together, these two concurrent and convergent thrusts have effectively redrawn the perimeter, mission, and modalities of action of pub- lic authority when it comes to managing the deprived and stigmatized populations stuck at the bottom of the class, ethnic, and urban hierarchy. The concomitant downsizing of the welfare wing and up- sizing of the criminal justice wing of the American state have not been driven by raw trends in poverty and crime, but fueled by a politics of resentment toward categories deemed undeserving and un- ruly. Chief among those stigmatized pop- ulations are the public-aid recipients and the street criminals framed as the two de- monic ½gureheads of the “black under- class” that came to dominate the journal- istic, scholarly, and policy debate on the plight 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 intensi½cation of the activities of the American police, criminal courts, and prison over the past thirty years have been ½nely targeted, ½rst by class, second by race, and third by place, leading not to mass incarceration but to the hyperincarceration of (sub)proletari- an African American men from the im- ploding ghetto. This triple selectivity re- veals that the building of the hyperactive and hypertrophic penal state that has made the United States world champion in incarceration is at once a delayed reac- tion to the civil rights movement and the ghetto riots of the mid-1960s3 and a disci- plinary instrument unfurled to foster the neoliberal revolution by helping to im- pose insecure labor as the normal hori- zon of work for the unskilled fractions of the postindustrial laboring class.4 The double coupling of the prison with the dilapidated hyperghetto, on the one side, and with supervisory workfare, on the other, is not a moral dilemma–as recent- ly argued by Glenn Loury in his Tanner Lecture5–but a political quandary call- ing for an expanded analysis of the nexus of class inequality, ethnic stigma, and the state in the age of social insecurity. Re- versing the racialized penalization of

74 Dædalus Summer 2010

Loïc Wacquant

Class, race & hyperincarceration in revanchist America

© 2010 by Loïc Wacquant

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poverty in the crumbling inner city re- quires a different policy response than mass incarceration would and calls for an analysis of the political obstacles to this response, which must go beyond “trickle-down” penal reform to encom- pass the multifaceted role of the state in producing and entrenching marginality.

The tale of the unexpected and expo- nential growth of jails and prisons over the past three decades in America after a half-century of carceral stability has often been told. But the raw increase of the population behind bars–from about 380,000 in 1975 to 2 million in 2000 and some 2.4 million today (counting juve- niles and persons held in police lockups, who are not registered by of½cial correc- tional statistics)–is only part of the story of the multisided expansion of the penal state.6 Four distinctive yet submerged dimensions of America’s punitive turn after the close of the Fordist era form the backdrop to my analysis of the deploy- ment of the disciplinary tentacles of the state toward the poor.

First, this phenomenal increase is re- markable for having been fueled, not by the lengthening of the average sentence as in previous periods of carceral infla- tion, but primarily by the surge in jail and prison admissions. Thus the number of people committed to state and federal penitentiaries by the courts ballooned from 159,000 in 1980 to 665,000 in 1997 (accounting for more than 80 percent of inmate growth during that period) before stabilizing at about a half-million annu- ally after 2002. This surge sharply differ- entiates the United States from Western European countries, most of which have also witnessed a steady, if comparatively modest, rise in incarceration over the past two decades, but one where growing stock is not due to increases in flow.7 A major contributor to this “vertical”

growth of the carceral system in Ameri- ca is the steep escalation in the volume of persons arrested by the police and the vastly enlarged role assumed by jails as frontline dams of social disorders in the city. This police hyperactivism has been disproportionate to and disjoined from trends in crime. One example: in New York City, under the campaign of “zero tolerance” promoted by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the number of arrests increased by 40 percent between 1993 and 1998 to top 376,000 while crime de- creased by 54 percent to reach 323,000, meaning that the police arrested more persons than it recorded offenses by the end of that period, compared to half as many at the start. Even though a grow- ing share of these arrests were abusive and did not lead to charges, admissions to jail rose by one-fourth, causing ram- pant congestion and daily pandemoni- um in the city’s custodial facilities.8

As a result of intensi½ed policing cou- pled with a rising propensity to con½ne miscreants, American jails have become gargantuan operations processing a dozen million bodies each year nationwide, as well as huge drains on the budgets of counties and pivotal institutions in the lives of the (sub)proletariat of the big cities.9 Indeed, because they treat vastly more people than do prisons, under con- ditions that are more chaotic due to high turnover, endemic overcrowding, popu- lation heterogeneity, and the administra- tive shift to bare-bones managerialism (the two top priorities of jail wardens are to minimize violent incidents and to hold down staff overtime), jails create more social disruption and family turmoil at the bottom of the urban order than do prisons. Yet they have remained largely under the radar of researchers and policy analysts alike.10

Second, the vertical rise of the penal system has been exceeded by its “hori-

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zontal” spread: the ranks of those kept in the long shadow of the prison via probation and parole have swelled even more than the 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 and 7.4 million in 2007. Probation and parole should be incorporated into the debate on the penal state, not only because they concern a much larger population than that of convicts (in 1998, eleven states each held in excess of 100,000 probation- ers under their heel, more than France did, with 87,000), but also because both are more likely to lead (back) to impris- onment than not: two in ½ve probation- ers and six in ten parolees who exited this status in 1997 were returned to custody within three years, either because they had committed a new offense or because they 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- ½cer, or traveling outside of their county of assignment without permission, for example). The purpose and functioning of parole have changed drastically over the past thirty years, from spring toward rehabilitation to penal trap, so that parole is now properly construed as an extension of the custodial system, rather than an alternative to it.11

The reach of penal authorities has also been dramatically enlarged beyond probation and parole by the exponential growth in the size, scope, and uses of criminal justice databases that, as of 2000, contained roughly sixty million ½les on an estimated thirty-½ve million individuals. Novel panoptic measures in- clude the diffusion of of½cial “rap sheets” through the Internet, the routinization of “background checks” by employers and realtors, the spread of public noti½-

cation statutes (and related laws seek- ing to expurgate speci½c categories of convicts, such as sex offenders, from the social body), and the shift from old-style ½ngerprints and mug shots to dna prints coordinated by the fbi.12 These institu- tional tentacles, and the routine practices of pro½ling, surveillance, and enclosure at a distance that they permit, severely curtail the life chances of former convicts and their families by stretching the effects of judicial stigma on the labor, housing, and marital markets as well as into daily life.13 Legislators have further ampli½ed these sanctions by adding a raft of restric- tions on the access of ex-felons to public services, privileges, and bene½ts, from public housing and public employment to college scholarships, parenting, and voting 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 billion in 2007, even as crime ½rst stagnated and then declined steadily after 1993. (Mean- while, criminal justice expenditures grew sevenfold, from $33 billion to $216 bil- lion.) This budgetary boom of 660 per- cent–amounting to a veritable carceral Marshall Plan during a period when suc- cessive administrations proclaimed to rein in public spending–½nanced the infusion of an additional one million criminal justice staff, which has made corrections the third largest employer in the nation, behind only Manpower Inc. and Wal-Mart, with a monthly pay- roll of $2.4 billion.

The upsizing of the carceral function of 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 main assistance programs ($11 billion for

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Aid to Families with Dependent Chil- dren [afdc] and $10 billion for food stamps) than on corrections ($7 bil- lion). By 1996, when ‘‘welfare reform’’ replaced the right to public assistance by the obligation to accept insecure employment as a condition of support, the carceral budget came to double the sums allocated to either afdc or food stamps ($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), effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.

Fourth, the building of America’s gigantic penal state is a nationwide en- deavor and a bipartisan achievement. Many scholars have rightly stressed that the United States does not have a criminal justice system so much as a loose patch- work of independent jurisdictions beset by administrative fragmentation and pol- icy dispersal bordering on incoherence.15 In light of wide regional and state varia- tions, others have highlighted the role of “local political culture” and modes of “civic engagement” in determining the mix and intensity of penal sanctions.16 Still others have reported that Republi- can governors, a large African American urban population, and “a state’s religious and political culture” exert a signi½cant influence on incarceration rates.17 Yet for all these and other geographic disparities and peculiarities, it remains that, over the past thirty-odd years, penal escala- tion has left no corner of the country un- touched and has brought about de facto uni½cation in the aggressive deployment of punishment. Aside from Maine and Kansas, all states saw their correctional counts grow by more than 50 percent be-

tween 1985 and 1995, at the peak of the carceral boom. Everywhere the ideal of rehabilitation has been abandoned or drastically downgraded, making retribu- tion and neutralization the main practi- cal rationale for con½nement.

Increases in the civic salience of crime and distrust in government have pushed all jurisdictions toward greater punitive- ness.18 Moreover, policy control over criminal justice has migrated to the feder- al level, where it has grown steadily more symbolic and less substantive since the 1970s.19 Indeed, this national slant is one of the distinctive causes of the severity of the 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 majority in statehouses, Congress, and the White House, as both parties have reflexively supported penal activism and expanded incarceration.21 Republicans will claim that they are “tougher on crime,” but Democratic majorities have run up the carceral tab in California, Illinois, Michi- gan, and New York. It was a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter (former governor of Georgia, one of the country’s most re- pressive states), who jump-started Amer- ica’s great “carceral leap forward.” And another Democratic president (and for- mer governor of another superpunitive state, Arkansas), Bill Clinton, who pushed for the most costly crime bill in world history (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994), oversaw the single largest expansion of incarcer- ation in the annals of democratic so- cieties: Clinton tallied an increase of 465,000 convicts for an added $15 bil- lion, compared to 288,000 convicts for a boost of $8 billion for Ronald Reagan.

The foregoing indicates that the foot- print of the penal state on the national body is much broader and heavier than usually

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depicted. At the same time, it is also con- siderably more pointed than conveyed by the current debate. It has become conven- tional among justice activists, journalists, and analysts of the U.S. carceral scene to designate 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 to the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II) and was soon codi½ed by David Gar- land at the interdisciplinary conference on “Mass Incarceration: Social Causes and Consequences,” held at New York University in 2000, which boosted re- search on the topic.23 The designation of mass incarceration is intuitively appeal- ing because it helps spotlight the outlier status of the United States on the world scene, dramatize the condition at hand, and thus draw scholarly and public atten- tion to it. But, much as it has been useful in terms of mobilizing intellectual and civic 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 the punitive turn, which leads to a different causal model and thence to different pol- icy prescriptions. Mass incarceration sug- gests that con½nement concerns large swaths of the citizenry (as with the mass media, mass culture, and mass unem- ployment), implying that the penal net has been flung far and wide across social and physical space. This is triply inaccu- rate. First, the prevalence of penal con- ½nement in the United States, while ex- treme by international standards, can hardly be said to concern the masses.

Indeed, a rate of 0.75 percent compares quite favorably with the incidence of such woes as latent tuberculosis infec- tion (estimated at 4.2 percent) and se- vere alcohol dependency (3.81 percent), ailments which no one would seriously contend have reached mass proportions in the United States.24 Next, the expan- sion and intensi½cation of the activities of the police, courts, and prison over the past quarter-century have been anything but broad and indiscriminate.25 They have been ½nely targeted, ½rst by class, second by that disguised brand of eth- nicity called race, and third by place. This cumulative targeting has led to the hyperincarceration of one particular cate- gory, lower-class African American men trapped in the crumbling ghetto, while leav- ing the rest of society–including, most remarkably, middle- and upper-class Afri- can Americans–practically untouched. Third, and more important still, this triple selectivity is a constitutive property of the phenomenon: had the penal state been rolled out indiscriminately by policies resulting in the capture of vast numbers of whites and well-to-do citizens, capsiz- ing their families and decimating their neighborhoods as it has for inner-city African Americans, its growth would have been speedily derailed and eventu- ally stopped by political counteraction. “Mass” incarceration is socially tolerable and therefore workable as public policy only so long as it does not reach the masses: it is a ½gure of speech, which hides the multiple ½lters that operate to point the penal dagger.26

Class, not race, is the ½rst ½lter of se- lection for incarceration. The welcome focus on race, crime, and punishment that has dominated discussions of the prison boom has obliterated the fact that inmates are ½rst and foremost poor people. Indeed, this monotonic class recruitment is a constant of penal history since the

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invention of houses of correction in the late sixteenth century27 and a fact con- ½rmed by the annals of U.S. incarcera- tion.28 Consider the social pro½le of the clientele of the nation’s jails–the gate- way into America’s carceral archipelago. This clientele is drawn overwhelmingly from the most precarious fractions of the urban working class29: fewer than half of inmates held a full-time job at the time of arraignment and two-thirds issue from households with an annual income com- ing to less than half the “poverty line”; only 13 percent have some postsecondary education (compared to a national rate above one-half ); 60 percent did not grow up with both parents, including 14 per- cent raised in foster homes or orphan- ages; and every other detainee has had a member of his family behind bars. The regular clients of America’s jails suffer from acute material insecurity, cultural deprivation, and social denudement– only 16 percent of them are married, compared to 58 percent for men of their age bracket nationwide. They also include disproportionate numbers of the home- less, the mentally ill, the alcohol- and drug-addicted, and the severely handi- capped: nearly one in four suffers from a physical, psychic, or emotional ailment serious enough to hamper his or her ability to work. And they come mostly from deprived and stigmatized neigh- borhoods that have been devastated by the double retrenchment of the formal labor market and the welfare state from the urban core.30 Conversely, very few members of the middle and upper classes ever sojourn at the “Graybar hotel,” es- pecially for committing the minor to middling crimes that account for the bulk of prison convictions. (In 1997, 11 percent of new court commitments to state penitentiaries were for public order offenses, 30 percent for narcotics convic- tions, and 28 percent for property crimes.)

Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff are but spectacular exceptions that spotlight this stringent class rule.

Race comes second. But the ethnic transformation of America’s prison has been at once more dramatic and more puzzling than generally recognized. To start, the ethnoracial makeup of convicts has completely flip-flopped in four decades, turning over from 70 percent white and 30 percent “others” at the close of World War II to 70 percent African American and Latino versus 30 percent white by century’s end. This inversion, which ac- celerated after the mid-1970s, is all the more stunning when the criminal popu- lation has both shrunk and become whiter during that period: the share of African Americans among individuals arrested by the police for the four most serious vio- lent offenses (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) dropped from 51 per- cent in 1973 to 43 percent in 1996,31 and it continued to decline steadily for each of those four crimes until at least 2006.32

Next, the rapid “blackening” of the prison population even as serious crime “whitened” is due exclusively to the astro- nomical increase in the incarceration rates of lower-class African Americans. In his book Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western pro- duces a stunning statistic: whereas the cumulative risk of imprisonment for African American males without a high- school diploma tripled between 1979 and 1999, to reach the astonishing rate of 59 percent, the lifetime chance of serving time for African American men with some college education decreased from 6 percent to 5 percent.33 Here again, the media melodrama around the arrest of Harvard University star professor Henry Louis Gates in Summer 2009 has hidden the fact that middle- and upper-class Afri- can Americans are better off under the present penal regime than they were thir-

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ty years ago. It has played to the national obsession for the black-white duality, which obfuscates the fact that class dis- proportionality inside each ethnic category is greater than the racial disproportionality between them: African American men are eight times more likely to sojourn behind bars than European American men (7.9 percent versus 1.0 percent in 2000), but the lifetime probability of serving time in prison for African American males who did not com- plete their secondary education is twelve times that for African Amer- ican males who went to college (58.9 percent versus 4.9 percent), whereas that class gap among white men stands at sixteen to one (11.2 percent versus 0.7 percent).34 The fact that these ra- tios were considerably lower two de- cades ago for both African Americans and European Americans (of the order of one to three and one to eight, respec- tively) con½rms that enlarged imprison- ment has struck very selectively by class inside of race, which again refutes the diagnosis of a “mass” phenomenon.

How was such double, nested selec- tivity achieved? How is it possible that criminal laws ostensibly written to avoid class and color bias would lead to throwing so many (sub)proletarian African American men under lock, and not other African American men?35 The class gradient in racialized impris- onment was obtained by targeting one particular place: the remnants of the dark ghetto. I insist here on the word remnants, because the ghetto of old, which held in its grip a uni½ed, if strati½ed, African American community, is no more. The communal 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. Franklin Frazier 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 race and class, on the one hand, and the satel- lite African American middle-class districts that mushroomed in the adjacent areas vacated by the mass exodus of whites to the suburbs, on the other.36

But to detect the tightening linkage between the decaying ghetto and the booming prison requires that one ef- fects two analytic moves. First, one must break out of the narrow ambit of the “crime and punishment” para- digm that continues to hamstring the scholarly and policy debate, in spite of its increasingly glaring inadequacy. A simple ratio suf½ces to demonstrate that crime cannot be the cause behind carceral hyperinflation: the number of clients of state and federal prisons boomed from 21 convicts per thousand “index crimes” in 1975 to 125 per thou- sand in 2005. In other words, holding the crime rate constant shows that the American penal state is six times more punitive today than it was three decades ago.37 Instead of getting sidetracked into investigations of the crime-punishment (dis)connection, one must recognize that the prison is not a mere technical imple- ment of government designed to stem offending, but a core state capacity de- voted to managing dispossessed and dis- honored populations. Returning to the early history of the prison in the long sixteenth century readily discloses that penal bondage developed, not to ½ght crime, but to dramatize the authority of rulers, and to repress idleness and enforce morality among vagrants, beg- gars, and assorted categories cast adrift by the advent of capitalism.38 The rise of the prison was part and parcel of the building of the early modern state to discipline the nascent urban proletariat

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and to stage sovereignty for the bene½t of the emerging citizenry. The same is true four centuries later in the dualizing metropolis of neoliberal capitalism.39

A second analytic shift is needed to ferret out the causal connection between hyperghettoization and hyperincarcera- tion: to realize that the ghetto is not a segregated quarter, a poor neighborhood, or an urban district marred by housing dilapidation, violence, vice, or disrepute, but an instrument of ethnoracial control in the city. Another return to social history demonstrates 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 in order to both exploit and exclude it from the life-sphere of the dominant. Like the Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Europe, the Black Belt of the American metropolis in the Fordist age combined four elements

–stigma, constraint, spatial con½nement, and institutional encasement–to permit the economic extraction and social ostra- cization of a population deemed congen- itally inferior, de½led and de½ling 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 de½ning, con½ning, and controlling African Americans in the urban industrial order.40

Penal expansion after the mid-1970s is a 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” that hemmed in African Americans from the 1920s to the 1960s. The ½rst is the post- industrial economic transition that shift- ed employment from manufacturing to services, from central city to suburb, and from 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 cause is the political displacement provoked by the Great White Migration to the sub- urbs: from the 1950s to the 1970s, millions of white families fled the metropolis in reaction to the influx of African Ameri- cans from the rural South. This demo- graphic upheaval, subsidized by the fed- eral government and bolstered by the courts, weakened cities in the national electoral system and reduced the political pull of African Americans. The third force behind the breakdown of the ghetto as ethnoracial container is African Ameri- can protest, fostered by the accumulation of social and symbolic capital correlative of ghettoization, culminating with the civil rights legislation, the budding of Black Power activism, and the eruption of urban riots that rocked the country between 1964 and 1968.

Unlike Jim Crow, then, the ghetto was not dismantled by forceful government action. It was left to crumble onto itself, trapping lower-class African Americans in a vortex of unemployment, poverty, and crime abetted by the joint withdrawal of the wage-labor market and the welfare state, while the growing African Ameri- can middle class achieved limited social and spatial separation by colonizing the districts adjacent to the historic Black Belt.41 As the ghetto lost its economic function of labor extraction and proved unable to ensure ethnoracial closure, the prison was called on to help contain a dishonored population widely viewed as deviant, destitute, and dangerous. This coupling occurred because, as previously suggested, ghetto and prison belong to the same organizational genus, namely, institutions of forced con½nement: the ghetto is a sort of “ethnoracial prison” in the city, 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 for the broader society from which it has been extruded.

To be sure, the structural homology and functional surrogacy of ghetto and prison do not mandate that the former be replaced by or coupled with the lat- ter. For that to happen, speci½c policy choices had to be made, implemented, and supported. This support sprang from the fearful reaction of whites to the ur- ban riots and related racial upheavals of the 1960s and from the rising political resentment generated by government powerlessness in the face of the stagfla- tion of 1970s and the subsequent spread of social insecurity along three tacks. First, middle-class whites accelerated their exodus out of the capsizing cities, which enabled the federal government to dismantle programs essential to the succor of inner-city residents. Second, working-class whites joined their mid- dle-class brethren in turning against the welfare state to demand that public aid be curtailed–leading to the “end of wel- fare as we know it” in 1996. Third, whites across the class spectrum allied to offer ardent political backing for the “law and order” measures that primed the penal pump and harnessed it to the hyperghet- to. The meeting ground and theater of these three political thrusts was the “re- vanchist city”42 in which increasing in- equality, diffusing social precariousness, and festering marginality fed citizens’ rancor 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 hyperghetto and 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 of public institutions in the inner city.43

On the one side, the ghetto was “prisonized” as its class composition became monoto- nously poor, its internal social relations grew stamped by distrust and fear, and its indigenous organizations waned to be re- placed by the social control institutions of the state. On the other side, the prison was “ghettoized” as rigid racial partition came to pervade custodial facilities; the predatory culture of the street supplant- ed the “convict code” that had tradition- ally organized the “inmate society”44; rehabilitation was abandoned in favor of neutralization; and the stigma of criminal conviction was deepened and diffused in ways that make it akin to racial dishonor. The resulting symbiosis between hyper- ghetto and prison not only perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and sym- bolic taint of the African American sub- proletariat, feeding the runaway growth of the carceral system. It also plays a key role in the revamping of “race” by asso- ciating blackness with devious violence and dangerousness,45 the rede½nition of the citizenry via the production of a ra- cialized public culture of vili½cation of criminals, and the construction of a post- Keynesian state that replaces the social- welfare treatment of poverty with its punitive containment.

Yet the tightening nexus between the hyperghetto and the prison does not tell the whole story of the frenetic growth of the penal institution in America after the civil rights revolution. In Punishing 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 criminalize poverty and its consequences so as to impress insecure, underpaid jobs as the modal employment situation of the un- skilled segments of the postindustrial proletariat. The sudden hypertrophy of the penal state was thus matched and

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complemented by the planned atrophy of the social state, culminating with the 1996 law on Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity, which replaced the right to “welfare” with the obligation of “workfare.” Each in its fashion, work- fare and prisonfare respond, not just to the crisis of the ghetto as a device for the sociospatial seclusion of Afri- can Americans, but to the repudiation of the Fordist wage-work compact and of the Keynesian social compromise of the postwar decades. Together, they en- snare the marginal populations of the metropolis in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them toward dereg- ulated employment through moral re- training and material suasion and, if they prove too recalcitrant and disrup- tive, to warehouse them in the devas- tated core of the urban Black Belt and in the penitentiaries that have become its distant yet direct satellites.

The workfare revolution and the penal explosion are the two sides of the same historical coin, two facets of the reengi- neering and masculinizing of the state on the way to the establishment of a novel political regime that may be character- ized as liberal-paternalist: it practices laissez-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 lower class and its territories. And, just as ra- cial stigma was pivotal to the junction of hyperghetto and prison, the taint of “blackness” was epicentral to the re- strictive and punitive overhaul of social welfare at century’s end. In the wake of the ghetto mutinies of the 1960s, the diffusion of blackened images of crime fueled rising hostility toward criminals and fostered (white) demands for expan- sive prison policies narrowly aimed at ret-

ribution and neutralization.46 During the same years, the spread of blackened images of urban destitution and depen- dency similarly fostered mounting re- sentment toward public aid, bolstering (white) support for restrictive welfare measures centered on deterrence and compulsion.47 Race turns out to be the symbolic linchpin that coordinated the synergistic transformation of these two sectors of public policy toward the poor.48

Again, like the joining of hyperghetto and prison, this second institutional pair- ing feeding carceral growth can be better understood by paying attention to the structural, functional, and cultural simi- larities between workfare and prisonfare as “people-processing organizations”49 targeted on problem populations and neighborhoods. It was tightened by the transformation of welfare in a punitive direction and by the expansion of the pe- nal system to “treat” more and more of the traditional clientele of welfare. Both programs of state action are narrowly directed at the bottom of the class and ethnic hierarchy; both effectively assume that their recipients are “guilty until pro- ven innocent” and that their conduct must be closely supervised as well as recti½ed by restrictive and coercive mea- sures; and both use deterrence and stig- ma to achieve behavioral modi½cation.

In the era of hypermobile capital and fragmented wage-work, the monitoring of the precarious segments of the work- ing class is no longer handled solely by the maternal social arm of the welfare state, as portrayed by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in their classic 1971 study Regulating the Poor.50 It entails a double regulation through the virile and controlling arms of workfare and prisonfare acting in unison. This dynamic coupling of social and penal policy at the bottom of the 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 inculcating the duty of working for work’s sake to poor women (and indirectly to their chil- dren), while the penal quartet formed by the police, the court, the prison, and the probation or parole of½cer shoulders the mission of taming their men–that is, the boyfriends or husbands, brothers, and sons of these poor women. Welfare pro- vision and criminal justice are animated by the same punitive and paternalist phi- losophy that stresses the “individual re- sponsibility” of the “client”; they both rely on case supervision and bureaucratic surveillance, deterrence and stigma, and graduated sanctions aimed at modifying behavior to enforce compliance with work 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 bene½ciaries, while the carceral population topped 2.1 million and the stock under criminal justice supervision surpassed 6.5 million.

In addition, welfare recipients and in- mates have nearly identical social pro½les and extensive mutual ties of descent and alliance con½rming that they are the two gendered 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 African American and Hispanic (37 percent and 18 percent versus 41 percent and 19 per- cent); the majority did not ½nish high school; and many suffer from serious physical and mental disabilities limiting their workforce participation (44 percent of afdc mothers as against 37 percent of jail inmates). And they are closely bound to one another by kin and marital and

social bonds, reside overwhelmingly in the same impoverished households and barren neighborhoods, and face the same bleak life horizon at the bottom of the class and ethnic structure. This intertwinement indicates that we cannot hope to untie the knot of class, race, and imprisonment, and thus explain hyper- incarceration, if we do not relink prison- fare and workfare, which in turn implies that we must bring the social wing of the state and its transformations into our analytic and policy purview.

Revanchism as public policy toward the dispossessed has thrust the country into a historical cul-de-sac, as the dou- ble coupling of hyperghettoization and hyperincarceration, on the one hand, and workfare and prisonfare, on the other, damages both society and the state. For society, the spiral of penal escalation has become self-reinforcing as well as self- defeating: the carceral Moloch actively destabilizes the precarious fractions of the postindustrial proletariat it strikes with special zeal, truncates the life op- tions of its members, and further despoils inner-city neighborhoods, thereby re- producing the very social disorders, ma- terial insecurity, and symbolic stain it is supposed to alleviate. As a result, the pop- ulation behind bars has kept on growing even as the overall crime rate dropped precipitously for some ½fteen years, yield- ing a paradoxical pattern of carceral levi- tation. For the state, the penalization of poverty turns out to be ½nancially ruin- ous, as it competes with, and eventually consumes, the funds and staff needed to sustain essential public services such as schooling, health, transportation, and social protection.51 Moreover, the pu- nitive and panoptic logic that propels criminal justice seeps into and erodes the shielding capacities of the welfare sector, for instance by inflecting the

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practices of child protective services in ways that turn them into adjuncts of the penal apparatus.52 It similarly un- dercuts the educational springboard, as depleted inner-city schools serving a clientele roiled by mass unemployment and penal disruption come to prioritize and manage issues of student discipline through a prism of crime control.53 Last- ly, the law-and-order guignol diverts the attention of elected of½cials and saps the energy of bureaucratic managers charged with handling the problem populations and territories of the dualizing city.

If the diagnosis of the rise of the penal state in America sketched here is correct, and hyperincarceration proceeding along steep gradients of class, race, and space

–rather than mass incarceration–is the offshoot of a novel government of social insecurity installed to absorb the shock of the crash of the ghetto and normalize precarious wage labor, then policies aimed at shrinking the carceral state must effectively reverse revanchism. They must go well beyond criminal justice re- form to encompass the gamut of govern- ment programs that collectively set the life chances of the poor, and whose con- current turnaround toward restriction and discipline after the mid-1970s have boosted the incidence, intensity, and dur- ation of marginality at the bottom of the class and ethnic order.54

A variety of cogent proposals for re- ducing America’s overreliance on con- ½nement to check the reverberations of urban dispossession and dishonor have been put forward on the penal front over the past decade.55 These proposals range from the renewal of intermediate sanc- tions, the diversion of low-level drug of- fenders, the abolition of mandatory sen- tencing, and the generalized reduction of the length of prison terms, to the reform of parole revocation, the incorporation of ½scal and social impacts into judicial

proceedings, and the promotion of re- storative justice. Whatever the technical means chosen, achieving sustained car- ceral deflation will require insulating judicial and correctional professionals from the converging pressures of the media and politicians, and rehabilitating rehabilitation through a public campaign debunking the neoconservative myth that “nothing works” when it comes to reforming offenders.56

Deep and broad justice reform is ur- gently needed to reduce the astronomical ½nancial costs, skewed social and admin- istrative burdens, and rippling crimino- genic effects of continued hyperincarcer- ation. But generic measures to diminish the size and reach of the prison across the board will leave largely untouched the sprouting epicenter of carceral growth–that is, the urban wastelands where race, class, and the penal state meet and mesh–unless they are com- bined with a concerted attack on labor degradation and social desolation in the decaying hyperghetto. For that to hap- pen, the downsizing of the penal wing must 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 devastated districts of the segregated metropolis. The programmed dereliction of public institutions in the inner city must be remedied through massive investment in schools, social services, health care, and unfettered access to drug and alco- hol rehabilitation. A Works Progress Administration-style public works pro- gram aimed at the vestiges of the historic Black Belt would help at once to rebuild its decrepit infrastructure, to improve housing 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 America’s

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bloated and voracious penal state will take more than a full-bore political com- mitment to ½ghting social inequality and ethnic marginality through progressive and inclusive government programs on the economic, social, and justice fronts.

It will necessitate also a spatially targeted policy to break the noxious nexus now binding hyperghettoization, restrictive workfare, and expansive prisonfare in the racialized urban core.

endnotes

1 Michael B. Katz, ed., The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton University Press, 1995); Alice O’Connor, 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 and multiform “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 the New Deal and the immediate postwar era”; Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentri- ½cation and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996), 42. See also Michael Flamm for a painstaking account of how the conflation of racial tumult, antiwar protest, civil disorder, and street crime laid the social foundation for the political demand for “law and 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 Loïc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

4 Loïc 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 4–6, 2007. A revised version is includ- ed in Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loïc Wacquant, Race, In- carceration, and American Values (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2008).

6 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, chap. 4–5. 7 Frieder Dünkel and Sonja Snacken, Les Prisons en Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005). 8 Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, 262–263, 121–125. The spiteful tenor of Giuliani’s cam-

paign of “class cleansing” of the streets and its strident racial overtones are captured by Neil Smith, “Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s,” Social Text 57 (Winter 1998): 1–20.

9 The sheer scale of American jails puts them in a class of their own. In 2000, the three largest custodial complexes in the Western world were the jails of Los Angeles (23,000 in- mates), New York (18,000), and Chicago (10,000). By contrast, the largest penitentiary center in Europe, the Fleury-Mérogis 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 the urban poor, John Irwin’s ½ne ethnography of San Francisco’s jail, dates from thirty years ago. See John Irwin, The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1985).

11 Joan Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (New York: Oxford University 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 ½ve years alone to reach eight million offender pro½les. Its explosive expansion, fed by technological innovation and organizational im- peratives, is springing a new “racialized dragnet” thrown primarily at lower-class African American men due to their massive overrepresentation among persons stopped by police; Troy Duster, “The Exponential Growth of National and State dna Databases: ‘Cold Hits’ and a Newly Combustible Intersection of Genomics, Forensics and Race,” paper presented to 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 Background Screening in Rental Housing,” Law & Social Inquiry 31 (1) (2008): 5–30; Richard Tewksbury and Matthew B. Lees, “Sex Offenders on Campus: University-Based Sex Offender Regis- tries and the Collateral Consequences of Registration,” Federal Probation 70 (3) (2006): 50–57. For an extended analysis of ramifying penal disabilities outside of prison walls, see Megan L. Comfort, “Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 271–296.

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): 10–17.

15 Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, The Scale of Imprisonment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michael Tonry, “Fragmentation of Sentencing and Corrections in America,” Alternatives to Incarceration 6 (2): 9–13.

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

17 David F. Greenberg and Valerie West, “State Prison Populations and Their Growth, 1971–1991,” Criminology 39 (1) (2001): 615–654; 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): 61–89. But see Kevin B. Smith, “The Pol- itics of Punishment: Evaluating Political Explanations of Incarceration Rates,” The Jour- nal of Politics 66 (3) (2004): 925–938.

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 Political and Social Science 605 (2006): 265–280.

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): 115–135.

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

21 “The war on crime–with its constituent imagery that melded the burning cities of the 1960s urban riots with the face of [Willie] Horton as (every) black man, murderer, rapist of a white woman–remade party af½liations and then remade the parties themselves, as the war came to be embraced and stridently promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike”; Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney-López, and Jonathan Simon, eds., After the War 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 Pro½ts From Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Paul Wright and Tara Herivel, eds., Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s 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 Mass Incarceration 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 ½rst broached, not in the U.S. prison debate, but in Western Europe by the French justice of½cial and scholar Jean-Paul Jean in a discus- sion of the “mass incarceration of drug addicts” in France’s jails; Jean-Paul Jean, “Mettre ½n à l’incarcération de masse des toxicomanes,” Esprit 10 (1995): 130–131. (I used the term myself in several publications between 1997 and 2005, so this conceptual revision is in part a 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, 1999–2000,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 177 (2008): 348–355; Bridget F. Grant et al., “The 12-month Prevalence and Trends in dsm-iv Alcohol Abuse and Dependence: Unit- ed States, 1991–1992 and 2001–2002,” Alcohol Research & Health 74 (3) (2004): 223–234.

25 To be sure, David Garland singles out two “esssential features” that de½ne mass incarcer- ation: “sheer numbers” (that is, “a rate of imprisonment and a size of prison population that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm for societies of this type”) and “the social concentration of mass imprisonment’s effects” (“when it becomes the impris- onment of whole groups of the population,” in this case “young black males in large urban centers”); Garland, Mass Imprisonment, 5–6. But it is not clear why the ½rst property would not suf½ce to characterize the phenomenon, nor what “markedly above” entails. Next, there is a logical contradiction between the two features of mass reach and concentrated impact (no other mass phenomenon “bene½ts” 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 con½ne- ment and mental asylums are merged; Bernard Harcourt, “From the Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution,” Texas Law Review 84 (2006): 1751–1786. These de½nitional troubles suggest that the mass characterization is an ad hoc designation crafted inductively to suit the peculiarities of U.S. incarceration trends at the twentieth century’s close (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 designation–espoused by advocates and critics of enlarged incarceration alike–is triply misleading: it passes civil- ian measures aimed at citizens for a military campaign against foreign foes; it purports to ½ght “crime” generically when it targets a narrow strand of illegalities (street offenses in the segregated lower-class districts of the city); and it abstracts the criminal justice wing from the broader revamping of the state entailing the simultaneous restriction of welfare and expansion of prisonfare.

27 Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern 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 of Imprisonment 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, “Con½ning 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), 350–380.

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); Loïc 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: Oxford University Press, 1995), 17.

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32 Michael Tonry and Matthew Melewski, “The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime Control Policies 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 increase

in incarceration over the past two decades, leading to more African American females being under lock than there are total women con½ned in all of Western Europe. But their capture comes 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 in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

36 Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 117–118. 37 The increase of this index of punitiveness is 299 percent for “violent crimes” as compared

with 495 percent for “index crimes” (aggregating violent crime and the major categories of property crime), con½rming that the penal state has grown especially more severe toward lesser offenses and thus con½nes 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 Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); Spierenburg, The Prison Experience.

39 Loïc Wacquant, “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare and Social Insecuri- ty,” Sociological Forum 25 (2) (2010): 197–220.

40 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punish- ment & Society 3 (1) (2001): 95–133.

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 Loïc Wacquant, “Race as Civic Felony,” International Social Science Journal 181 (Spring

2005): 127–142. 46 John 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 Welfare Reform (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 ½gures offered lurid incarnations of “dependency”: the flamboyant and wily “welfare queen,” the immature and irresponsible “teenage mother,” and the aimless and jobless “deadbeat dad.” All three were stereotypically portrayed as African American residents of the dilapidated inner city.

49 Yeheskel Hasenfeld, “People Processing Organizations: An Exchange Approach,” American Sociological Review 37 (3) (1972): 256–263.

50 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Wel- fare, expanded edition (New York: Vintage, 1993; ½rst published in 1971).

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51 This is well illustrated by the current predicament of California, a state that employs more prison guards than it does social workers: it just slashed its higher education budgets and increased college tuition by 30 percent in response to a de½cit of $20 billion in 2009, when it spends an extravagant $10 billion on corrections (more than its yearly outlay for univer- sities for ½fteen 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 for brutally long terms.

52 Dorothy E. Roberts, “Criminal Justice and Black Families: The Collateral Damage of Over- enforcement,” U.C. Davis Law Review 34 (2000): 1005–1028.

53 Paul J. Hirsch½eld, “Preparing for Prison? The Criminalization of School Discipline in the usa,” Theoretical Criminology 12 (1) (February 2008 ): 79–101.

54 Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, 69–91, 280–287. 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 African American Communities,” Stanford Law Review 56 (5) (2004): 1271–1305; Jacobson, Down- sizing Prisons; Marie Gottschalk, “Dismantling the Carceral State: The Future of Penal Policy Reform,” Texas Law Review 84 (2005): 1693–1750; Marc Mauer and the Sentencing Project, Race to Incarcerate, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 2006); James Austin and Todd R. Clear, “Reducing Mass Incarceration: Implications of the Iron Law of Prison Popula- tions,” Harvard Law & Policy Review 3 (2007): 307–324.

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 and increase reoffense rates. The mean recidivism effects found in studies of rehabilitation treatment, by comparison, are consistently positive and relatively large”; Mark W. Lip- sey and Francis T. Cullen, “The Effectiveness of Correctional Rehabilitation: A Review of Systematic Reviews,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3 (2007): 297–320. 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 ½nd pathways to redemption is demonstrated by John Irwin, Lifers: Seeking Redemption in Prison (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 are both inef½cient and detrimental to the pressing needs and distinct interests of the urban minority poor; Mary Pattillo, “Investing in Poor Black Neighborhoods ‘As Is,’” in Legacy of Racial Discrimination and Segregation in Public Housing, ed. Margery Turner, Susan Popkin, and Lynette Rawlings (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2008), 31–46.

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