Rethinking the Penal State

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc 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, which is 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 that captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonoured categories by targeting their neighbourhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and 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 epicentre 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.