The irresistible rise of the penal state in the United States manifests the implementation of a policy of criminalization of poverty that is the indispensable complement to the imposition of precarious and underpaid wage labor as civic obligation for those trapped at the bottom of the class and caste structure. The prison has thus regained a central place in the panoply of instruments for the government of poverty, at the crossroads of the deskilled labor market, the collapsing urban ghetto, and social-welfare services "reformed" with a view to buttressing the discipline of desocialized wage work.
prison; workfare; ghetto; poverty; United States; neoliberalism