Rethinking the Penal State
1st Edition
Published on 22. May 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
528 pages
978-1-5095-7304-2 (ISBN)
Description
In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loic Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures 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.
Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. 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-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper penality" and "street penality."
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 to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.
Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. 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-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper penality" and "street penality."
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 to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.
Reviews / Votes
"Rethinking the Penal State is a breath of fresh air and sure to become a major reference point in the study of punishment. It demonstrates that punishment is central not only to statecraft, but to producing citizenship. It is must-read for students, scholars, and policymakers interested in why and how democratic societies remain on the cusp of justice rather than realizing it."Vanessa Barker, author of Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order
"Wacquant paints on canvas that is as wide as the global history of penal forms and as precise and detailed as the best ethnographies. Easily one of the most important contributions to the theory of punishment and society in the twenty-first century."
Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 230 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 39 mm
Weight
756 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5095-7304-2 (9781509573042)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Loic Wacquant
Rethinking the Penal State
Book
05/2026
1st Edition
Polity Press
€83.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Loic Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre Europeen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris.
Content
A Genealogical Sketch
Overture: On Punishment, the State and Citizenship
The criminal as anti-citizen
The many faces and functions of penality
A historicist-analytical approach
1. Penality as Core State Capacity and Negative Sociodicy
Punishment and social structure revisited
Punishment and the state: the puzzle of mutual ignorance
Durkheim, Rusche and Foucault on penality: passion, labor, disciplines
Reformation versus retribution: meshing philosophies of punishment
Weber, Mann and Scott on the state: force, penetration, legibility
The three states of Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu 1, penality in the bureaucratic field
Bourdieu 2, Right hand and Left hand
Bourdieu 3, symbolic capital and negative sociodicy
Three structural properties of the penal state
2. Marginality, Ethnicity, Territory
The stunning return of the prison
Penalization as neoliberal statecraft
Lessons from social history: marginality floods the city
Province of the precariat: class and ethnicity behind bars
Managing marginality by targeting territory
Structural osmosis
'Paper penality' versus 'street penality'
Historical excursus: colonial penality and the urban badlands
The penal triad in the tropics
Bringing unruly bodies to heel, or indigenat at work
Special punishment in neighborhoods of relegation
3. Penal Power Incarnate: A Day in the Life of a Prosecutor
A structural ethnography of prosecutorial practice
Situating the pretrial prosecutor
'The Professor' comes to court
Anatomy of the local judicial field
A day in the life
'Down in the trenches'
The splintering of punishment across class fractions
A cautionary note on race and prosecution
Judicial tagging and relational contracting
The human spear of the state
Coda: The Parable of Marx's Hangman and the Aporias of Abolitionism
Urban marginality, penal policy and social rights
Abolitionism as penal millenarism
The ten tenets of radical penal minimalism
Penal transformation and the 'ethic of responsibility'
Overture: On Punishment, the State and Citizenship
The criminal as anti-citizen
The many faces and functions of penality
A historicist-analytical approach
1. Penality as Core State Capacity and Negative Sociodicy
Punishment and social structure revisited
Punishment and the state: the puzzle of mutual ignorance
Durkheim, Rusche and Foucault on penality: passion, labor, disciplines
Reformation versus retribution: meshing philosophies of punishment
Weber, Mann and Scott on the state: force, penetration, legibility
The three states of Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu 1, penality in the bureaucratic field
Bourdieu 2, Right hand and Left hand
Bourdieu 3, symbolic capital and negative sociodicy
Three structural properties of the penal state
2. Marginality, Ethnicity, Territory
The stunning return of the prison
Penalization as neoliberal statecraft
Lessons from social history: marginality floods the city
Province of the precariat: class and ethnicity behind bars
Managing marginality by targeting territory
Structural osmosis
'Paper penality' versus 'street penality'
Historical excursus: colonial penality and the urban badlands
The penal triad in the tropics
Bringing unruly bodies to heel, or indigenat at work
Special punishment in neighborhoods of relegation
3. Penal Power Incarnate: A Day in the Life of a Prosecutor
A structural ethnography of prosecutorial practice
Situating the pretrial prosecutor
'The Professor' comes to court
Anatomy of the local judicial field
A day in the life
'Down in the trenches'
The splintering of punishment across class fractions
A cautionary note on race and prosecution
Judicial tagging and relational contracting
The human spear of the state
Coda: The Parable of Marx's Hangman and the Aporias of Abolitionism
Urban marginality, penal policy and social rights
Abolitionism as penal millenarism
The ten tenets of radical penal minimalism
Penal transformation and the 'ethic of responsibility'