Neoliberal penality at work: a response to my spanish critics

Abstract

In response to a symposium organized by Spanish colleagues, I highlight three distinctive contributions ofPunishing the Poor to debates on marginality and penality in the neoliberal era of deepening inequality anddiffusing social insecurity. First, I stress that criminology must expand its analytic purview beyond the standardformula of “crime and punishment” to heed the extrapenological role of the justice system. Crime does notdetermine punishment; rather, it offers raw materials for a collective work of political selection and cultural elaboration of specific illegalities, which in turn provide an opportunity and a target for state action and (re)construction. Second, I argue that we must integrate the analysis of social welfare policy and penal policy, and I outline how Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” allows us to bring them into a single analytic framework to show how they effect the double regulation of the precariat. The third challenge is to join the material and the symbolic modalities of penality in one and the same analysis, rather than stitch them togetheras separable parts, or swing from one to the other at the risk of dichotomizing them. This is essential to grasp the pornographic character of neoliberal penality: it is rolled out as moral theater and political spectacle.