six - Beyond the penal state: advanced marginality, social policy and anti-welfarism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
Summary
Introduction
Loïc Wacquant's extraordinarily extensive writing over recent years has sparked widespread commentary across a range of academic disciplines but notably, for our purposes, in criminology, social policy and urban studies. Many of those commentating on Urban outcasts (2008), Punishing the poor (2009a) and Prisons of poverty (2009b) in the UK and Europe express support for Wacquant's overall analysis and the contributions his insights make to the way we assess and conceptualise neoliberal state-craft, penality, the restructuring of welfare and its implications. In this vein, writers have sought to extend, modify and qualify Wacquant's analysis in the light of empirical observations in a variety of settings, further comparative analysis and theoretical fine-tuning within an overall appreciative framework. We adopt the same kind of stance in this chapter. The themes we explore focus on Wacquant's (2008) work on ‘advanced marginality’, what this means in the contemporary UK and the role of territorial stigmatisation in the production of marginality. This occupies an important position within his overall approach which arguably has not received the same level of attention as some of his other concepts.
Wacquant has placed important emphasis on the interrelationships between social welfare and criminal justice. We explore a number of aspects which are somewhat overlooked by Wacquant – in particular, we highlight that representations of ‘the urban poor’ as a ‘problem’ category in the population (both historically and contemporarily) are significant aspects not only of advanced marginality but also of social policy interventions (understood in their broadest sense). Further, advanced marginality and the construction of particular disadvantaged populations as problematic are also enabled and reinforced by what is increasingly being referred to as ‘poverty porn’ and ‘penal pornography’. Wacquant has given some attention to the latter (2009a, p xii). He observes that:
… [t]he law-and-order merry-go-round is to criminality what pornography is to amorous relations: a mirror deforming reality to the point of the grotesque that artificially extracts delinquent behaviours from the fabric of social relations in which they take root and make sense, deliberately ignores their causes and their meanings, and reduces their treatment to a series of conspicuous position-takings, often acrobatic, sometimes properly unreal, pertaining to the cult of ideal performance rather than to the pragmatic attention to the real. (Wacquant, 2009a, pp xii-xiii)
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- Criminalisation and Advanced MarginalityCritically Exploring the Work of Loïc Wacquant, pp. 107 - 128Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2012