Prisons and crime are still widely seen as concerning fields of state action that are distinct from social or labour-market policy. This article looks at the way neoconservative attacks on the remnants of the Keynesian welfare state reflect a ‘penal management of poverty’ that blurs such distinctions. This approach presages a dramatically increased role for state and state-contracted coercion aimed at labour and the poor. But such escalations do not happen automatically, and are still vulnerable to effective resistance, as this article will show.
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