Punishing The Poor Analysis
Punishing the Poor places an emphasis on the way in which mass incarceration is a neoliberal creation meant to oppress the lower class. Two very important systems that Wacquant highlights and focuses on are the social welfare system and the penal system. The social welfare system, which is geared more towards women, provides assistance with food, housing etc. The penal system is found to be geared more towards men, incarcerating them at very high rates compared to before the civil rights movement took place. Another very important topic is the induced fear of social welfare amongst the middle class which helped to give reason for the restricting of benefits of public welfare for the poor and the rising stigma of those who depend on the government
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The drastic increase of the prison population was not due to crime being on the rise but rather in a given area but rather the ability of the media and government to play on the social fear of the middle class as was the case when black men began being labeled as rapists and the reason for the country’s crime problem. As many poor areas, which had majority black occupants, were becoming deindustrialized, many unskilled, uneducated laborers were without jobs, more susceptible to crime as many turned to illegal avenues for income and were now being incarcerated by the masses as the country began to implement a harsher penal system and increase police presence in these poor communities. There was an emphasis on race and it being a divisive power in society especially after the civil rights movement and so there was an effort to introduce a new form of confining this class that sought to implement collective mobilization and civil disobedience to reform areas like Chicago’s ghettos. The ghettos served as a type of ethnoracial prison, or another way of controlling where poor blacks were situated. As retaliation towards these efforts, there was white flight into suburban areas, restrictive welfare for the poor and enlarging of the penal state. Thus the beginning shifts from a welfare state to prisonfare
The drastic increase of the prison population was not due to crime being on the rise but rather in a given area but rather the ability of the media and government to play on the social fear of the middle class as was the case when black men began being labeled as rapists and the reason for the country’s crime problem. As many poor areas, which had majority black occupants, were becoming deindustrialized, many unskilled, uneducated laborers were without jobs, more susceptible to crime as many turned to illegal avenues for income and were now being incarcerated by the masses as the country began to implement a harsher penal system and increase police presence in these poor communities. There was an emphasis on race and it being a divisive power in society especially after the civil rights movement and so there was an effort to introduce a new form of confining this class that sought to implement collective mobilization and civil disobedience to reform areas like Chicago’s ghettos. The ghettos served as a type of ethnoracial prison, or another way of controlling where poor blacks were situated. As retaliation towards these efforts, there was white flight into suburban areas, restrictive welfare for the poor and enlarging of the penal state. Thus the beginning shifts from a welfare state to prisonfare