Loic Wacquant: mass incarceration as a social policy in contemporaneity

Abstract

Over the last four decades, America has embarked on an unprecedented social and political experience. The replacement of a state of social welfare by a criminal state indicates that the criminalization of marginality and punitive containment of disinherited categories are confused with social policy: programs aimed at vulnerable populations have always been limited and isolated from the rest of the activities. In this way, the disciplinary vocation is affirmed mainly in the direction of the inferior classes and of the dominated ethnic categories. We will see through this article the conjuncture of Afro-American imprisonment according to Loic Wacquant.