Most of the chapters in this collection originated from a conference on the recent work of Loïc Wacquant organised by the University of Brighton Criminology Group in September 2010. The decision to hold this conference arose from a reading of his recent book, Punishing the poor (Wacquant, 2009a), which, together with his earlier Urban outcasts (Wacquant, 2007), provide one of the most systematic and detailed accounts available in sociology of the impact of neoliberalism on the welfare state and the penal system in the US and Western Europe.

By now it is absolutely clear that earlier characterisations of neoliberalism as simply the ‘retreat of the state’ were wide of the mark. Although selective reductions in state spending and privatisation in various forms have been an important feature, of much more significance have been changes in the role of the state, in particular the emergence of new strategies of control and coercion. From the standpoint of a criminology and sociology of welfare, which have spent well over a decade focused on various forms of decentralisation and privatisation, Wacquant's return to a focus on the state as the key institution of surveillance and coercion is most welcome as is his focus on neoliberalism as involving not the retreat of the state but the development of new techniques of coercion and social control. In this light neoliberalism can be seen as a fundamentally coercive strategy aimed at demolishing many of the social rights of the welfare state and weakening the ability of the working class to defend itself against wage cuts and unemployment. These are seen by the defenders of neoliberalism as necessary ‘medicine’ to regain economic competitiveness under conditions of globalisation. One consequence has been the creation of a ‘precariat’ (see Standing, 2011), characterised by extremes of ‘advanced’ social and economic marginality and whose life is spent in and out of insecure, temporary, low-wage labour and unemployment. Variously termed the ‘underclass’ or the ‘socially excluded’, the precariat is typically the major focus of penal and social policy. For Wacquant, as for most of the contributors to this collection, the management of the precariat is ‘the’ or at least ‘a’ major component of penal and social policy.