In this chapter, I explain how and why ‘the prison’ has returned to the institutional forefront of advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path towards extinction. I draw on my book Punishing the poor (Wacquant, 2009a, p 315) to argue that the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to crime trends but to the diffusion of social insecurities; that we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new politics of marginality; and that the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive ‘workfare’ and expansive ‘prisonfare’ are contributing to to the forging of the neoliberal Leviathan. By way of introduction, let me indicate how I moved from the study of urban inequality to that of the penal state on my way to adapting Bourdieu's concept of ‘bureaucratic field’ to capture the revamping of poor discipline at this century's dawn.

Punishing the poor is the second volume in a trilogy that unravels the triangular nexus between class transformation, ethno-racial division and the revamping of the state in the era of neoliberal hegemony. Think of a triangle with the two-way relationship between class and ‘race’ forming the base and the state providing the top. The first book in the trilogy, Urban outcasts (Wacquant, 2008), explores the base: it takes up the class/‘race’ nexus in the dualising metropolis through a comparison of the sudden collapse of the black US ghetto with the slow disintegration of working-class territories in the Western European city after deindustrialisation. I make three main arguments: I challenge the fashionable thesis of a transatlantic convergence of ‘districts of dispossession’ on the model of the dark ghetto; I trace the making of the African American ‘hyper-ghetto’ and of the ‘anti-ghettos’ of Europe in the post-Fordist age to shifts in public policy, arguing that both formations are economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined; and I diagnose the onset of a new regime of urban marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the curtailment of the social state and territorial stigmatisation.