Over the past 30 years a growing body of scholarship has highlighted the significance of practices of punishment and penality within contemporary Western societies. Penal expansionism, most dramatically evidenced in the United States, has drawn the attention of a raft of commentators, including that of French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. In this essay, Wacquant’s three recent volumes – UrbanOutcasts, Punishing the Poor and Prisons of Poverty – are considered with a particular focus on the theoretical and empirical contours of his over-arching account of the rise of what he calls a ‘new government of social insecurity’.
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