It is argued throughout this book that the criminalisation of social policy operates through intensified, modified and fine-tuned mechanisms in contemporary times. Our chosen mode of understanding it (based on definitions provided by Gustafson, 2009, and Bach, 2019), as elaborated in the Introduction to this book, is equipped to take account of these mechanisms. The criminalisation of social policy is not, of course, new, as, historically, social policy provision has by default operated by separating the deserving from the undeserving from amongst those worst affected by the fallout and contradictions of capitalism. The impacts of neoliberal governing have been traced and analysed by scholars and researchers across a broad range of disciplinary fields, including anthropology, history, economics, political science, geography and legal studies. This book has drawn on these extant bodies of work to illuminate and track the contours of how criminalisation of social policy is shaped in contemporary times.

From the outset, there was an awareness that poverty and poor persons who are criminalised were being written about, without direct engagement with the people in question. However, throughout each of our chapters, effort has been made to show how criminalisation of social policy across a range of themes and in a variety of national contexts has material effects on individuals, families and communities. By turning the gaze upwards towards the neoliberal state in its shifting forms and various governing technologies, the harms that welfare states can commit when designing and delivering social policy has been the focus. The intention is not to deny the benefits to be gained from various services and supports offered by neoliberal welfare states, or the good intentions of individual professionals, policymakers and organisations. However, this book shows that, at its heart, neoliberal welfarism involves dividing, individualising and responsibilising individuals for challenging circumstances, which are not of their own making, but are constructed as if they are.

Furthermore, the overall aim of our book has been to capture and illustrate how the neoliberal governmental project distracts from larger and deeper societal transformations, by continuously attaching its governing logics to new surfaces and targets; by perpetually redefining its operations and by engaging in endless loops of incremental regulation and punishment of poverty.