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: