Loic Wacquant- Iperincarcerazione. Neoliberismo e criminalizzazione della povertà negli Stati Uniti @ Ombre Corte, It, Novembre 2013

Loic Wacquant

Iperincarcerazione

Neoliberismo e criminalizzazione della povertà negli Stati Uniti

pp. 141

isbn 9788897522454

Prefazione di Patrizio Gonnella il libro A partire dalla metà degli anni Settanta gli Stati Uniti hanno sperimentato una graduale sostituzione della regolazione della povertà attraverso il welfare con un continuum carcerario-assistenziale che intreccia e connette i discorsi, le pratiche e le categorie del workfare con quelle di un apparato penale ipertrofico e iperattivo. Questo passaggio, però, non riguarda tutti gli americani: esso si manifesta soprattutto nei confronti dei poveri, dei pericolosi, dei reietti, di coloro che si mostrano recalcitranti al nuovo ordine economico ed etnorazziale che va delineandosi sulle ceneri del defunto sistema fordista-keynesiano e del ghetto urbano in via di sgretolamento. Colpisce dunque soprattutto il sottoproletariato di colore delle grandi città, i segmenti dequalificati e precari della classe operaia, e coloro che, rifiutando un "lavoro schiavistico" e un salario da fame, si rivolgono all'"economia informale di strada". La tesi a cui giungono i documentati saggi qui raccolti è che questa trasformazione si presenta strettamente connessa alla complessiva ristrutturazione neoliberista del mercato e dello stato. I nuovi criteri di criminalizzazione e di controllo sociale rappresentano solo la punta dell'iceberg di un complesso di politiche pubbliche che comportano la riorganizzazione e il ridispiegamento dello stato. L'obiettivo è rafforzare i meccanismi di mercato e di disciplinare il nuovo proletariato postindustriale, tenendo a freno la disarticolazione interna prodotta dalla frammentazione del lavoro, dal declino dei programmi di protezione sociale e dalla conseguente ristrutturazione delle consolidate gerarchie etniche. La posta in gioco, allora, non è tanto la criminalità e la pena, quanto la trasformazione di uno stato in grado di promuovere e fronteggiare le condizioni economiche, sociali e morali che si manifestano all'ombra del neoliberismo. Un trasformazione, del resto, che non ha tardato a varcare l'oceano e a coinvolgere quasi tutti gli stati dei paesi europei. l'autore Loic Wacquant insegna al Centre de sociologie européene du College de France ed è professore associato di sociologia all'University of California (Berkeley). Tra le sue opere tradotte in italiano ricordiamo Parola d'ordine: tolleranza zero (Feltrinelli, 2000), Anima e corpo (DeriveApprodi, 2002), Punire i poveri (DeriveApprodi, 2006) e per i nostri tipi Simbiosi mortale. Neoliberalismo e politica penale (2002). Read more

Audio Podcast by Bernard Harcourt – The Punitive Order: Free Markets, Neoliberalism, and Mass Incarceration in the United States @ The Foucault Effect 1991-2011 @ Birkbeck College, Uk, 3-4 June 2011

Bernard Harcourt – The Punitive Order: Free Markets, Neoliberalism, and Mass Incarceration in the United States

Event Date: 3 and 4 June 2011 Clore Lecture Theatre
Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck College
Malet Street, Bloomsbury
London WC1E 7HX

The Birkbeck Centre for Law and the Humanities presents:

THE FOUCAULT EFFECT 1991-2011

A Conference at Birkbeck College, University of London Reflecting on 20 years of
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality

Bernard Harcourt - The Punitive Order: Free Markets, Neoliberalism, and Mass Incarceration in the United States

Much has been written about Michel Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism, both of neoliberalism in general and of the three different varieties of neoliberalism that he specifically discussed in his 1979 lectures (German Ordoliberalism, French Giscardian neoliberalism, and the Chicago School). In this essay, I explore Foucault’s critique of American neoliberalism specifically, and its relation to contem‐porary punitive practices in the United States.

Bernard Harcourt

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/harcourt

Recent lecture material online (French language):

Fabienne Brion, Bernard Harcourt: Le pouvoir de la vérité. Trois lectures de ‘Mal faire, dire vrai’, de Michel Foucault http://www.academieroyale.be/cgi?pag=1026&tab=146&rec=10279

Bernard is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law, the Chair of the Political Science Department, and Professor of Political Science at The University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt’s scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. His latest book is The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011) and the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault’s Mal faire, dire vrai (forthcoming in French at Presses Universitaires de Louvain and in English at the University of Chicago Press). He is also the author ofAgainst Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007),Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), andIllusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Harcourt is the coauthor of Criminal Law and the Regulation of Vice (Thompson West 2007), the editor of Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York University Press 2003), and the founder and editor of the journal Carceral Notebooks.

After law school, he clerked for the Hon. Charles S. Haight Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then worked as an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, representing death row inmates. He continues to represent death row inmates pro bono, and has also served on human rights missions in South Africa and Guatemala.

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Neoliberal Penality

Neoliberal Penality: A Brief Genealogy

Bernard E. Harcourt 

University of Chicago - Law School
June 29, 2009
Theoretical Criminology, Forthcoming University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 472 University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 268 
     
The turn of the twenty first century witnessed important shifts in punishment practices. The most shocking is mass incarceration - the exponential rise in prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries and in county jails beginning in 1973. It is tempting to view these developments as evidence of something new that emerged in the 1970s - of a new culture of control, a new penology, or a new turn to biopower. But it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the 1970s since most of the recent trends have antecedents and parallels in the early twentieth century. It is important, instead, to explore the arc of penality over a longer course: to relate recent developments to their earlier kin at the turn of the twentieth century.

What that larger perspective reveals is that the pattern of confinement and control in the past century has been facilitated by the emergence and gradual dominance of neoliberal penality. By neoliberal penality, I have in mind a form of rationality in which the penal sphere is pushed outside political economy and serves the function of a boundary: the penal sanction is marked off from the dominant logic of classical economics as the only space where order is legitimately enforced by the state. This essay traces a genealogy of neoliberal penality going back to the emergence and triumph of the idea of natural order in economic thought - back to the Physiocratic writings of François Quesnay and other economists during the 1760s. It is precisely their notion of natural order that metamorphosed, over time, into the modern idea of market efficiency that is at the heart of neoliberal penality.