Rethinking the Penal State

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's signal concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he resolves the opposition between rationalist theories of penality running from Jeremy Bentham to Karl Marx and emotionalist theories descending from Immanuel Kant to Émile Durkheim to capture the constitutive duality of punishment at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.

By rolling out the police, court, prison and their bureaucratic tentacles, the penal state curates crime, contains moral disorders, manages urban marginality and draws the boundary of citizenship. Its day-to-day deployment also signals sovereignty and serves to manufacture political legitimacy in the eyes of the general population. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-making institution based on the stubborn differentiation of 'paper penalty' and 'street penality' The structural osmosis between districts of urban dereliction and the carceral institution on both sides of the Atlantic is such that we cannot understand the penal state without understanding the dual city and vice versa.

To flesh out penal power as strategic action, Wacquant takes us deep inside a criminal court in California where we discover that the prosecutor who negotiates guilty pleas is the human spear of the state. In his daily tussles with defense attorneys and the sentencing judge, he calibrates and drives the concrete infliction of physical and psychic force upon bodies deemed out of order.

Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate, rather than abandoned to the periodic panic-peddling of electoral politics. Instead of chasing the chimera of abolition, we should muster the intellectual resources needed to reclaim the vexed duality of 'law and order' for a progressive politics. This requires articulating a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic citizenship.
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