Race and Class: The Hyper-Criminalization of Poverty in the US PDF

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Policing Diverse Communities – Week 3

January 21, 2019

Race and Class: The Hyper-Criminalization of Poverty in the US Wacquant: 

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Wacquant dismantles the legend of US “Law and Order” approach by showing that its root is neoliberalism – every individual should submit to the free market, cutting the social net, privatization of services and supposed weakening of state. Two phenomena: the “crisis of the welfare state” and the eruption of the U.S penal state. U.S. Prison Population grows 5x over 25-year span, to over 2 million: o Criminal justice supervision (jail, parole, etc) extends to 7 million + o Runaway budgets for law enforcement alongside deep cuts to social safety net o Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice is now the third largest employer in the U.S.

General Approach  

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The goal was the control of marginal populations newly thrust into a world a precarity with closing of industrial plants in U.S. New penalty works to contain and control people at the margins of class and cultural order. Three Strategies to “treat” undesirable or threatening conduct: o Socialization: housing for the homeless, schools for offenders- requires social welfare o Medicalization: treat homeless persons for alcohol addiction and psychiatric o Penalization: no understanding required; mark homeless as delinquent – throw in jail Growth in prison is not driven by crime trends, but by political resentment. Not the result of a crime increase; state’s gaze trained on illegalities: class, race, place, etc

Racial disproportionality of prison population:   

Inverted prison makeup in 40 years (70% Anglo in 1950, 30% today) Arrest rates hold for groups but the incarceration rate widens A majority of sub-proletarian African-Americans serve a prison term

4 Peculiar Institutions: 1. 2. 3. 4. -

Chattel Slavery (ca. 1619-1865) Jim Crow System of Legal Segregation (South, Ca. 1865-1965) Ghetto (1915-1968) Hyper-ghetto and prisons (1968-) All are instruments for extraction of labour and social ostracization of stigmatized groups.

“One-drop rule” – Individuals were identified as black if they shared any sort of ancestor or DNA with someone of African descent. Wacquant’s four constitutive elements of the ghetto 1. Stigma 2. Constraint 3. Spatial confinement

4. Institutional parallelism  Ghetto is a “social-organizational” space that “reconciles two antinomic functions” 1. “to maximize the material profits extracted out of a category deemed defiled and defiling” 2. “to minimize intimate contact with its members so as to avert the threat of symbolic corrosion and contagion they are believed to carry.”...