‘The Prison is an Outlaw Institution’

Abstract This discussion of L es P risons de la misère ( R aisons d'agir E ditions , P aris, 1999 – expanded and updated E nglish‐language edition, P risons of P overty , M inneapolis, U niversity of M innesota P ress, 2009) responds to queries put forth by the editors of R de réel and originally published in F rench in that journal in J une 2000 (vol. 3, pp.33–8). It argues that the carceral boom in the U nited S tates results from the penalisation of poverty correlative of the simultaneous revamping of the economic, welfare and justice missions of the state. Pro‐market think tanks have played a driving role in fashioning and diffusing A merica's ‘punitive common sense’ across the A tlantic, thus accelerating the import of aggressive crime rhetorics and policies in W estern E urope by political elites (including Left governments) seduced by neoliberal ideology. But, while the prison purports to enforce the law and to curtail the disorders generated by economic deregulation, the recent French experience confirms that its very organisation and daily operation make it an outlaw institution. It is promoted as a remedy for criminal insecurity and urban marginality, but it only serves to concentrate and intensify both, even as it makes them temporarily invisible. To get out of the policy and civic impasse into which the penalisation of poverty leads contemporary societies, we must raise anew the quintessentially political question of the purpose(lessness) of incarceration at century's dawn.