ABSTRACT
Despite assertions from “third way” evangelists that participation in a “free” and “unfettered” labor market restores dignity and ameliorates disparate social conditions, changes in the political economy over the last several decades have had considerable, negative effects on the life chances of poor people across categories of difference. Neoliberalism has in part facilitated the advent of new modes of surveillance to police the “dangerous classes,” has resulted in the “hollowing out” of the welfare state and general erosion of the social safety net, signaled the emergence of a new “enemy from within” through harsh immigration policies, and catalyzed the re-regulation of the domestic sphere in ways that privilege markets. This includes the de-regulation of food, labor, housing, and transportation policies that at least rhetorically protected groups considered to be the nation’s “deserving poor”— children, the elderly, the “disabled,” and the willing but unemployed worker. Street-level bureaucrats’ discretion and authority in the day-to-day lives of impoverished people has increased significantly (Lipski, 1980). New welfare regulations disqualified families struggling with generational poverty from the receipt of continuous welfare benefits (Katz, 2001; Soss et al., 2011). All the while sanctions targeting single mothers and “dead-beat fathers” were used to fleece the welfare rolls and, in effect, privilege “traditional” family forms, all the while policing the reproductive behaviors, leisure, and work patterns of single-parent families that were often non-white, considered “non-traditional,” and impoverished (Geva, 2005; Roberts, 1997). With the emergence and “glorification” of “hyper-incarceration”—the selective targeting of unskilled black workers made “redundant” by a changing political economy for criminal justice intervention-poor urban and rural denizens now live under the watchful gaze of an expanded penal state (Eason, 2012; Goffman, 20091; Wacquant, 2009 and 2010), leading sociologist Loic Wacquant to admonish scholars of punishment and poverty to “relink social welfare and penal policies” in order to “grasp the new politics of marginality” (Wacquant,
2009 and 2012a). This “new politic” is not simply the result of a “hollowed-out state,” but of a redeployed and reconfigured one (Wacquant, 2012b), significantly expanding the reach of the state into the everyday lives of the poor. To this end, Wacquant writes:
[T]he police, the courts and the prisons are, upon close examination, the somber and stern face that Leviathan turns everywhere toward the dispossessed and dishonored categories trapped in the hollows of the inferior regions of social and urban space by economic deregulation and the retrenchment schemes of social protection.
