Rethinking the Penal State

A Genealogical Sketch

Overture: On Punishment, the State and Citizenship
The criminal as anti-citizen
The many faces and functions of penality
A historicist-analytical approach

1. Penality as Core State Capacity and Negative Sociodicy
Punishment and social structure revisited
Punishment and the state: the puzzle of mutual ignorance
Durkheim, Rusche and Foucault on penality: passion, labor, disciplines
Reformation versus retribution: meshing philosophies of punishment
Weber, Mann and Scott on the state: force, penetration, legibility
The three states of Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu 1, penality in the bureaucratic field
Bourdieu 2, Right hand and Left hand
Bourdieu 3, symbolic capital and negative sociodicy
Three structural properties of the penal state

2. Marginality, Ethnicity, Territory
The stunning return of the prison
Penalization as neoliberal statecraft
Lessons from social history: marginality floods the city
Province of the precariat: class and ethnicity behind bars
Managing marginality by targeting territory
Structural osmosis
'Paper penality' versus 'street penality'
Historical excursus: colonial penality and the urban badlands
The penal triad in the tropics
Bringing unruly bodies to heel, or indig©nat at work
Special punishment in neighborhoods of relegation

3. Penal Power Incarnate: A Day in the Life of a Prosecutor
A structural ethnography of prosecutorial practice
Situating the pretrial prosecutor
'The Professor' comes to court
Anatomy of the local judicial field
A day in the life
'Down in the trenches'
The splintering of punishment across class fractions
A cautionary note on race and prosecution
Judicial tagging and relational contracting
The human spear of the state

Coda: The Parable of Marx's Hangman and the Aporias of Abolitionism
Urban marginality, penal policy and social rights
Abolitionism as penal millenarism
The ten tenets of radical penal minimalism
Penal transformation and the 'ethic of responsibility'