Re-thinking The Political Economy Of Punishment: Perspectives On Post-fordism And Penal Politics (new Advances In Crime And Social Harm)

The political economy of punishment suggests that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies: in this respect, each 'mode of production' knows its peculiar 'modes of punishment'. However, global processes of transformation have revolutionized industrial capitalism since the early 1970s, thus configuring a post-Fordist system of production. In this book, the author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies. Current penal politics can be seen as part of a broader project to control this labour force, with far-reaching effects on the role of the prison and punitive strategies in general. Re-Thinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics 4 Contents 6 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 10 1 The Political Economy of Penality and the Sociology of Punishment – Past and Present 16 Introduction 16 Penality and the Critique of Political Economy 18 Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer: Punishment and Social Structure and the Foundation of the Political Economy of Punishment 21 The Political Economy of Punishment and the New Histories of Punishment 24 A Just Measure of Pain 25 Discipline and Punish 27 The Prison and the Factory 30 Political Economies of Contemporary Penality 34 Incarceration and Unemployment: The United States 34 Incarceration and Unemployment: Other Contexts 40 Variations on a Theme 43 A Return to Rusche and Kirchheimer? 48 Beyond the Political Economy of Punishment? 54 2 Post-Fordism and the Emergence of the Multitude 56 Post-Fordism: A Regime of Surplus 56 Social Surplus: ‘The New Excluded’ 62 Productive Surplus: ‘The Immaterial Labour Force’ 69 The Post-Fordist Labour Force as a Multitude 75 3 The Government of Surplus – Preliminary Incursions in the Field of Post-Fordist Social Control 82 From the ‘Discipline of Scarcity’ to the ‘Government of Surplus’ 82 Control as ‘Non-Knowledge’ 89 The Panopticon and Beyond: Signs of a Post-Disciplinary Order 92 The Punitive Metropolis 96 Bridling the Net 101 4 Mass Confinement and Actuarial Penology 106 Mass Imprisonment: From the Welfare State to the Penal State? 106 Incarcerating Risk: The Actuarial Prison 118 5 The Criminalisation of International Migrations: Towards an Actuarial Model of Control? 126 Introduction: Migrations in a Global Economy 126 European Immigration Control: Towards a ‘Penal State’? 132 Immigration as an ‘Ontological Crime’ 139 The War on Immigrants across Europe and the United States 141 Detention and Expulsion as Actuarial Technologies 144 Conclusion 154 Bibliography 160 Index 178 Examining the political economy of punishment, this book debates the view that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies. The author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies and the role of penal politics in controlling this labour force.