The Punitive Turn in Social Policies: Critical Race Feminist Reflections on the USA, Great Britain, and Beyond

Abstract

This article reviews Loic Wacquant's (2009) book Punishing the Poor, arguing that critical race or intersectional feminist theory and scholarship on the state provides important insights on social policy developments that are overlooked or under-theorized by Wacquant. We draw heavily from our own research on welfare state restructuring and grassroots welfare rights activism in the USA and Great Britain, but we also review other relevant scholarship on welfare and criminal justice policies. We conclude with both a research agenda for further critical race and feminist analysis of recent transformations in the state, and a political agenda informed by critical race feminism for those interested in challenging the punitive trends in policies towards the poor.

Welfare conditionality, benefit sanctions and homelessness in the UK: ending the ‘something for nothing culture’ or punishing the poor?

“…As in the USA, the UK has shifted to a position where policies premised on changing the 'conduct' of the poor seek to rectify, deter and sanction through the move from voluntary to compulsory programmes of 'assistance'. The poor are thus portrayed as in need of moral discipline, and policy and legislation the mechanism through which this can be achieved (Wright, 2012;Fischer and Reese, 2011;Wacquant, 2009). Social problems such as unemployment and homelessness, it is argued, increasingly become a moral identifier that needs rectifying (McDonald and Marston 2005) and the welfare system effectively becomes a means of 'maintaining moral standards and disciplining perceived transgressions' (Partick and Brown, 2012).…”

Appointment Time: Disability and Neoliberal Workfare Temporalities

“…Given their new legislative authority to monitor citizens on workfare programs, these service landscapes enact social technologies of surveillance, such as individual compacts, to enforce workforce participation as a duty of citizenship (Bessant, 2000). The effects, differentiated by disability, gender, race, class and geo-political positioning enforce citizens into a deepening and enduring web of 'surveillance' landscapes; churning participants through workfare programming that actively seeks to individualize and moralize their structural location of disadvantage, marginalization and poverty (Fisher and Reese, 2011;Hancock, 2004;Soldatic and Pini, 2009). Disabled people have not been exempt from neoliberal workfare restructuring.…”

Conceptualizing the Carceral Turn: Neoliberalism, Racism, and Violation

“…Ruth Gilmore (2007) shows that the development of this racialized regime of punishment responds to a set of political-economic crises in which the state confronts surpluses of capital, land, and (black and brown) bodies: In this way, the growth of the prison system is simultaneously an economic and racial project. The complex intersectionality that characterizes contemporary incarceration builds as well on reservoirs of patriarchy, as gender-based oppression makes women of color particularly vulnerable to being exploited both in networks of illegal activity and by law enforcement and the prison system (Fisher and Reese, 2011; Sudbury, 2002, 2005).…”

“…More generally, complex accounts of the simultaneous and interlocking effects of race, class, and gender within the turn to punishment (e.g. Fisher and Reese, 2011) often do not work through the relationship of these forces to each other or the broader logic within which they are mobilized. At stake is how what Gilmore (2002) refers to elsewhere as the ‘political geography of race’ is fundamentally identified with the imperative of capital accumulation as this is shaped by conditions of crisis and resistance.…”