VI. Just in Case: Hyper-Extended Penal Apparatus

To be on the safe side, the neoliberal order did not leave the project of disciplining the working classes entirely to debt. It complemented the “invisible hand” of the precarious labor market and burdens of debt with the “iron fist” of the penal state. Indeed, mass incarceration and a “plague of prisons” have become a defining feature of the neoliberal age.

Betraying “an eerie similarity” between criminal justice and welfare reform, the neoliberal era is marked by a “culture of control,” *51 “penalisation of poverty,” and an “enlargement and exaltation of the penal sector” of the state. A renewed deployment of the penal apparatus “increase[es] the cost of strategies of exit into the informal economy of the street” and “neutralizes and warehouses” its most disruptive factions or those “rendered wholly superfluous” by the new economy. While between 1950 and 1970 the imprisonment rate declined, it saw an exponential boom after 1975. Between 1975 and 2000, the total incarcerated population increased by 500 percent. In the United States today, over seven million adults are subjected to the correctional system, including 2,266,800 incarcerated and 4,887,900 under criminal justice supervision outside prisons. Racial minorities and the economically marginalized constitute disproportionate parts of this population. Since 1975, “corrections” posted the fastest expansion in public expenditures and has become the third largest employer in the U.S. As public housing has been dismantled in large part as part of welfare reform, prisons have “effectively [become] the country's main public housing program.” In tune with the neoliberal agenda of turning the state into a market-state, the penal system has been increasingly privatized. For-profit private prisons, *52 reinstituted in 1983 after having been outlawed in 1925, saw an exponential growth, yielding handsome profits for the burgeoning industry. In line with replacing taxes with user- fees, federal and state governments increasingly adopted “carceral taxation” to have inmates pay for the cost of their own incarceration. Coercive discipline, of course, begins in the streets. The “militarization” of the American police that started with the “war on drugs” and accelerated with the “war on terror” was on display as the Occupy Movement erupted in late 2011.

For the working classes, the expanded deployment of the penal arm of the state increases the cost of not participating in the increasingly precarious labor markets. The prospect of falling off the treadmill of the financialized debt-driven becomes more frightening than ever. This further substantiates the position that law and the state remain critical enablers of subject-forming governmentalities.