Punishing The Poor Analysis

Punishing the Poor places an emphasis on the way in which mass incarceration is a neoliberal creation meant to oppress the lower class. Two very important systems that Wacquant highlights and focuses on are the social welfare system and the penal system. The social welfare system, which is geared more towards women, provides assistance with food, housing etc. The penal system is found to be geared more towards men, incarcerating them at very high rates compared to before the civil rights movement took place. Another very important topic is the induced fear of social welfare amongst the middle class which helped to give reason for the restricting of benefits of public welfare for the poor and the rising stigma of those who depend on the government
for its aid in that respect and the emphasis on workfare which translated to an individual’s responsibility to care for themselves and their families. With media propaganda, poor black women who were depending on government aid were branded as welfare queens and were depicted as those who would exploit the government aid they were receiving by, for example, illegally using multiple social security numbers to increase their benefits.
Another very important and heavily emphasized concept is the induced fear of the middle class and its relation to mass incarceration.
The drastic increase of the prison population was not due to crime being on the rise but rather in a given area but rather the ability of the media and government to play on the social fear of the middle class as was the case when black men began being labeled as rapists and the reason for the country’s crime problem. As many poor areas, which had majority black occupants, were becoming deindustrialized, many unskilled, uneducated laborers were without jobs, more susceptible to crime as many turned to illegal avenues for income and were now being incarcerated by the masses as the country began to implement a harsher penal system and increase police presence in these poor communities. There was an emphasis on race and it being a divisive power in society especially after the civil rights movement and so there was an effort to introduce a new form of confining this class that sought to implement collective mobilization and civil disobedience to reform areas like Chicago’s ghettos. The ghettos served as a type of ethnoracial prison, or another way of controlling where poor blacks were situated. As retaliation towards these efforts, there was white flight into suburban areas, restrictive welfare for the poor and enlarging of the penal state. Thus the beginning shifts from a welfare state to prisonfare
state.
As money began to be pumped into building prisons, even when some states lacked the funds to employ staff to run the prisons and thus stayed idle for periods of time, it did not take long for the rates of money going into prison to surpass public spending on welfare, food stamps, schools etc. In some cases, it can be found that the amount of money to house an inmate reaches five times the maximum aid a mother receives with Aid to Families with Dependent Children or AFDC. In order to reduce the costs of the expensive incarceration policies, some inmates and their families are responsible for a fraction of their incarceration costs as well as lowing the living standards and services including eliminating literacy and remedial education.
Politicians also make it a point to take away any privileges of inmates, even when these “privileges” are not necessarily enjoyed by the inmates, to seem tough on crime. Careers of harsh prison wardens would be accelerated for their iron-fist tactics with the idea that prisoners should suffer so much that they would never want to return upon release.