“However, as we see in the writings of several liberal political economists, the main problem was not poverty per se, since poverty was actually believed to play a useful function in compelling certain groups of people to labour. Rather, the problem was that there was a constant threat of the poor falling into indigence, which, it was argued, encouraged immoral and criminal offences, thus rendering society less secure. The nineteenth-century institutions and discourses that governed poverty and criminality worked together to police the line between poverty and indigence and to preserve the former while eliminating the threat associated with the latter.” PovertyPunishmentCriminalityIndigence Book:Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare Source: Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare
“Intricately connected to the restructuring of relations of production, neoliberalism has also entailed the restructuring of social reproduction in ways that have rendered it increasingly insecure for particular sectors of the population. In the US, Canada and the UK, the move from welfare to ‘workfare’ states is particularly relevant, though other cutbacks to government services, the hollowing out of public housing, the restructuring of pension plans in ways that render them increasingly dependent on global financial markets and the imposition of austerity measures (especially in Europe) post-2008 are all key moves that have contributed to the ‘reprivatization of social reproduction’. The latter refers to the ways in which the decline in social forms of provisioning in most OECD countries over the past several decades has resulted in an increase in the amount of work done by families, particularly by women, and/or the private sector.” NeoliberalismSocial Reproduction Book:Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare Source: Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare
“While there has indeed been an increase in coercive state practices over the past several decades relative to much of the twentieth century, when viewed as part of the long history of capitalism, the carceral excesses of neoliberalism have much in common with the dispossession of the peasantry from the land in England and, globally, the ‘Bloody legislation’ used to terrorize those who violated newly established norms of private property, the criminalization of women who contravened historically specific norms of chastity and femininity, and the violent disciplining of different segments of the population deemed insufficiently ‘rational’ to respond to the market-based incentives that are so often assumed to be the key disciplinary mechanisms underpinning capitalist society” CapitalismIncarcerationPolicingCoercive State Practices Book:Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare Source: Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare