How penal common sense comes to europeans

This article analyzes the processes whereby a new ‘penal common sense’ aiming to criminalize poverty and thereby normalize precarious wage labor has incubated in America and is being internationalized, alongside the neoliberal economic ideology which it translates and complements in the realm of ‘justice’. Three operations are distinguished in the transatlantic diffusion of this new doxa on ‘security’: (1) the gestation and dissemination of terms, theses, and measures that converge to penalize social insecurity and its consequences; (2) their borrowing, through a work of adaptation to the national cultural idiom and state tradition, by the officials of the different receiving countries; (3) the ‘academicization’ of the categories of neoliberal understanding by pseudo-social research that serves to legitimize the bolstering of the penal state. Denunciations of ‘urban violence’ and increased surveillance of ‘problem neighborhoods’, curfews and the targeting of petty drug offenders, deregulation and privatization of criminal justice services, ‘prison works’ and ‘zero tolerance’: these mottos, notions, and policies promoted by neoconservative think-tanks in the United States and their British trading posts have spread throughout western Europe where they facilitate the transition from a social welfare to a penal management of the rising social misery. Thus one needs to extend the expression ‘Washington consensus’, commonly used to designate neoliberal measures of ‘structural adjustment’ imposed by the rulers of global finance on debtor nations, to encompass the policing and carceral management of the increased poverty and marginality that are the socio-logical consequence of these economic policies in advanced societies.