Introduction

Loïc Wacquant, in his recent series of publications, has outlined an impressive thesis to explain penal expansionism in the US (Wacquant, 2009a) and the adoption of these policies elsewhere in Europe (Wacquant, 2009b). His account of a seemingly more punitive state is linked to the neoliberal programme of welfare retreatism and inextricably linked to penal regulation. In Punishing the poor, Wacquant is persuasive in his argument, providing extensive evidence to support his contentions. In particular, he draws our attention to the precariousness of poor women and the extent to which they are disciplined and controlled by the state through an emphasis on ‘workfare’ rather than welfare. As he suggests,

Wacquant then distinguishes these two components along gendered lines, suggesting that women are the recipients of the regulatory ‘workfare’ programmes (pointing out that 90 per cent of welfare recipients are mothers) and men the receivers of ‘prisonfare’. He argues that what we are seeing is a ‘remasculinising’ of the state where ‘the quartet formed by the police, the court, the prison and the probation or parole officer assumes the task of taming their boyfriends, or husbands and their sons’ (2009a, p 15). However, as Gelsthorpe (2010) rightly argues in her analysis of Wacquant's recent work, his thesis would have benefited from a further exploration of how ‘both social and penal policy over the past two decades in particular have escalated the punitive outcomes for women’ (p 377). In addition, Gelsthorpe examines the ways in which the remasculinisation of the state has had an impact on women who have been treated both within welfare and penal systems with distinct features of moral tutelage apparent in a number of policies. Wacquant's work has also been criticised for failing to adequately deal with the ambiguities and unevenness of these developments elsewhere (Nelken, 2010).