2
Punishment and Political
Economy
Since its origins in the first decades of the
19th century, and for most of the 20th cen-
tury, criminology has been the study of
crime rather than the study of punishment:
punishments, criminal policies, and strate-
gies of social control were not the objects
of criminological analysis, but rather tools
to govern the criminal question. The main
objective of criminology, particularly in its
positivist currents, was the scientific produc-
tion of effective strategies for the govern-
ment of deviance and criminality (Pasquino,
1980).
Between the late 1960s and the early
1970s, however, these epistemological bound-
aries were challenged by the emergence of
radical perspectives on punishment and social
control. The main target of this new critical
approach was exactly the positivist paradigm
that had dominated the field of criminologi-
cal research since its very birth. The rejection
of what David Matza famously defined as
the correctional perspective (1969: 1540)
concerned in the first place the theoretical
and methodological tenets of positivist crim-
inology its presumed scientific neutrality,
its assumption that social problems had
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 40
Alessandro De Giorgi
objective causes that social scientists could
discover through adequate methodologies,
and its ambition to unveil objective truths
about criminal behavior. Most importantly,
the emerging new criminology (Taylor
et al., 1973) would question the political
implications of the positivist approach in
particular, its emphasis on the elaboration of
strategies that could effectively address the
causes of deviance, correct criminals, and
ideally eradicate crime itself.
The political context of the 1960s, with
its radical critique of all repressive institu-
tions (family, university, asylum, prison), and
the irruption of Marxism into the academic
field, laid a fertile ground for the emergence
of critical perspectives on social and penal
control.1 The forms of punishment, rather
than the causes of crime, became the focus of
the new criminological agenda. In particular
the prison, the technology of punishment
peculiar to modernity, became the object
of critical inquiry. Several studies began to
investigate the historical trajectory through
which imprisonment had come to replace
earlier forms of punishment and the reasons
for its persistence in contemporary societies.
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 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Looking beyond the rhetorical legitimation
of the prison the defense of society from
crime in the name of public safety critical
scholars began to reveal its latent functions.
A first direction of analysis focused on
the role of penal systems in the history of
capitalist societies. The new revisionist his-
tories of punishment that appeared between
the late 1960s and the early 1980s decon-
structed mainstream penal historiography,
criticizing in particular its teleological bias
that is to say, its tendency to represent the
history of punishment as an ongoing process
of reform and as a linear advancement toward
more humane sanctions. Against this reform-
ist historiography (Ignatieff, 1983: 76), char-
acterized by a narrative of progress that
obscured the role played by penal technolo-
gies in the consolidation of class power, revi-
sionist historians attempted to re-politicize the
history of punishment, reconstructing it from
the point of view of the privileged targets of
social control: the working classes, the poor,
the dispossessed (Platt, 1969; Foucault, 1977;
Ignatieff, 1978; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981).
A second body of research emerged toward
the end of the 1970s and focused on the
transformations of penality in contemporary
late-capitalist social formations (Quinney,
1980). In this context, changes in penal
practices and specifically variations in the
severity of punishment, as measured by rates
of imprisonment were analyzed against the
background of the transformation of class
relations in advanced capitalist societies
(Spitzer, 1975; Quinney, 1980; Adamson,
1984). Thus, while revisionist historians of
punishment unveiled the historical connec-
tions between the invention of the peniten-
tiary and the birth of a capitalist system of
production based on the extensive exploita-
tion of wage labor, neo-Marxist critics of
contemporary penal politics examined the
persistence of that same connection in late-
capitalist societies, analyzing the relationship
between current penal forms and capitalist
labor markets (for a review of this literature,
see Chiricos and DeLone, 1992; Melossi,
1998; De Giorgi, 2006: 1939).
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 41
41
Taken together, these two perspectives
contend that penal politics plays a very
different role than defending society from
crime: both the historical emergence of
specific penal practices and their persistence
in contemporary societies, are structurally
linked to the dominant relations of produc-
tion and to the hegemonic forms of work
organization. In a society divided into classes,
criminal law cannot reflect any general
interest:
The would-be theories of criminal law that derive
the principles of penal policy from the interests of
society as a whole are conscious or unconscious
distortions of reality. Society as a whole does not
exist, except in the fantasy of the jurists. In reality
we are faced only with classes, with contradic-
tory, conflicting interests. Every historically given
system of penal policy bears the imprint of the
class interests of that class which instigated it.
(Pashukanis, 1978: 174)
Whether in the context of a structural cri-
tique of bourgeois legal ideologies (as in the
work of Evgeny Pashukanis just quoted), of
a cultural analysis of the role of moral panics
in policing the crisis of late-capitalist socie-
ties (Hall et al., 1978), or of a deconstruction
of penal discourses as ideological state
apparatuses (Althusser, 1971), the ground
had been set for a materialist critique of pun-
ishment as a tool of class control.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
PUNISHMENT
The sociological foundations of what would
later become the political economy of punish-
ment had already been laid down in the late
1930s by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer
in the early pages of their classic Punishment
and Social Structure:
Every system of production tends to discover
punishments which correspond to its productive
relationships. It is thus necessary to investigate the
origin and fate of penal systems, the use or avoid-
ance of specific punishments, and the intensity of
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 42 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
penal practices as they are determined by social
forces, above all by economic and then fiscal
forces. (1939 [2003]: 5)2
Rusche and Kirchheimer argued that a socio-
logical understanding of the historical and
contemporary transformations of penal sys-
tems should be informed by a structural
analysis of the connections between penal
technologies and transformations of the
economy in particular, the transition of
modern societies from a pre-capitalist to a
capitalist mode of production.
The birth of what Michel Foucault would
later define as disciplinary practices and
institutions of confinement in place of the
torturous spectacles of suffering staged in
the main squares of European cities until
the 18th century (see Spierenburg, 1984),
should thus be interpreted as a constitutive
part of the broader shift toward a new system
of production based on the complete separa-
tion between the workers and the owner-
ship of the conditions for the realization of
their labor (Marx, 1867 [1976]: 874). Against
the background of a new emerging class
structure shaped by the relation between
capital and wage labor, the political economy
of proto-capitalist societies started to con-
ceive the human body as a resource to be
exploited in the process of production, rather
than wasted in the symbolic rituals of corpo-
ral punishment:
In fact the two processes the accumulation
of men and the accumulation of capital
cannot be separated; it would not have been
possible to solve the problem of the accumulation
of men without the growth of an apparatus
of production capable of both sustaining them
and using them; conversely, the techniques that
made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful
accelerated the accumulation of capital. (Foucault,
1991: 221)
Modern penal institutions played a decisive
role in the consolidation of a process of capi-
talist production based on the factory and
grounded in the commodification of human
labor (Marx, 1867 [1976]: 896926). At the
outset of the bourgeois revolution, the great
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 42
confinement of beggars, criminals, prosti-
tutes and the idle poor in workhouses, poor-
houses and houses of correction throughout
Europe (Foucault, 1965: 3864) contributed
to transform the free and rightless proletar-
iat (Marx, 1867 [1976]: 896) created by the
crisis of the feudal economy into a docile,
obedient and disciplined labor force ready
to be incorporated in the emerging sites of
capitalist production. The historical emer-
gence, consolidation, and ongoing transfor-
mation of modern penal practices would
thus reflect capitals need to carve a docile
and laborious workforce out of the unruly,
undisciplined and sometimes riotous dan-
gerous classes constantly generated by capi-
tal itself as a by-product of its movement
of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey,
2003: 13782).
According to this materialist framework,
the specific configurations of the relation-
ship between penal technologies and eco-
nomic structures would be shaped by the
logic of less eligibility. This concept, first
developed in England in the early 19th cen-
tury, had provided the main rationale for
the English Poor Laws of 1834. In its early
formulation, the principle held that:
The first and most essential of all conditions,
a principle which we find universally admitted,
even by those whose practice is at variance with it,
is, that his [the relief recipients] situation on the
whole shall not be made really or apparently
so eligible [i.e., desirable] as the situation of the
independent laborer of the lowest class. (Quoted
in Piven and Cloward, 1993: 35)
According to this logic, public assistance
should never raise the living conditions of
the destitute above the standards of life avail-
able to the poorest among the working poor;
otherwise, public relief would become more
eligible (more desirable) than waged work.
Georg Rusches intuition was to apply the
principle of less eligibility to the analysis
of penal change: since the aim of any penal
system is to deter the most marginalized
classes of society from committing crimes
of desperation (Rusche, 1933 [1978]: 4)
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 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
thus violating the capitalist injunction to
rely only on their work to survive it follows
that the conditions of life generally available
in the lowest regions of the class structure
will invariably set the standards of living for
those who are caught in the net of the penal
system. In Rusches words:
Although experience shows the rich to occasion-
ally break the law too, the fact remains that a
substantial majority of those who fill the prisons
come from the lower strata of the proletariat.
Therefore, if it is not to contradict its goals,
the penal system must be such that the most
criminally predisposed groups will prefer a minimal
existence in freedom, even under the most
miserable conditions, to a life under the pressure
of the penal system. (1930 [1980]: 42)
In Rusches view, however, the rationality of
penal practices is not limited to the negative
logic of deterrence. Indeed, the function of
less eligibility is not only to deter the most
disadvantaged classes from resorting to crime
(or public assistance) to survive, but also
and even more importantly to force the
poor to prefer any available working condi-
tions to the sanctions attached to criminal
behavior and refusal to work. By setting the
standards of living for those punished below
the situation of the lowest socially signifi-
cant proletarian class (Rusche, 1933 [1978]:
4), the principle of less eligibility ensures
that the most marginalized fractions of the
working class will accept any level of exploi-
tation in the capitalist labor market, as this
will be in most cases preferable to being pun-
ished for refusing to work at the given condi-
tions. In a capitalist economy, this means that
the situation of the marginal proletarian class
will shape criminal policies, and therefore
the conditions of those who are punished:
One can also formulate this proposition as
follows: all efforts to reform the punishment of
criminals are inevitably limited by the situation
of the lowest socially significant proletarian class
which society wants to deter from criminal acts.
All reform efforts, however humanitarian and
well meaning, which go beyond this restriction,
are condemned to utopianism. (Rusche, 1933
[1978]: 4)
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 43
43
What Rusche is criticizing here is the repre-
sentation of the history of punishment as a
sequence of humanitarian reforms toward
civility. This progressive description of penal
transformation is unrealistic, Rusche argues,
because the principle of less eligibility
to which any penal system must ultimately
conform sets a structural limit to any
reform effort or civilization process. The
pace and direction of penal change are
dictated by the overall situation of the work-
ing class, and in a capitalist economy that
situation is determined in the first place by
the labor market. The dynamics of the market
will establish the fair price of labor as
of any other commodity: an increase in the
supply of workers that are superfluous to
capitals average requirements for its own
valorization (Marx, 1867 [1976]: 782), will
lessen the value of human labor, worsening
the conditions of the working class. The
consequence, according to the principle of
less eligibility, is that any increase in the
size of the surplus population will prompt
harsher penal policies:
Unemployed masses, who tend to commit crimes
of desperation because of hunger and deprivation,
will only be stopped from doing so through cruel
penalties. The most effective penal policy seems
to be severe corporal punishment, if not ruthless
extermination In a society in which workers
are scarce, penal sanctions have a completely
different function. They do not have to stop
hungry people from satisfying elementary needs.
If everybody who wants to work can find work,
if the lowest social class consists of unskilled
workers and not of wretched unemployed work-
ers, then punishment is required to make the
unwilling work, and to teach other criminals that
they have to content themselves with the income
of a honest worker. (Rusche, 1933 [1978]: 4)
Consequently, the emergence or the demise
of different penal practices cannot be ascribed
to the ideas of the reformers: penal change
is ultimately determined by the conditions
of labor and, more specifically, of the labor
market. This implies that no penal reform is
irreversible, and that humane punishments
will be quickly replaced by penal cruelty
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 44 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
whenever new socioeconomic conditions
will prompt this shift; and penal institutions
will turn again into places of pure torture,
suitable to deter even the most wretched
(Rusche, 1933 [1978]: 6)3.
Rusche and Kirchheimer reinterpret the
whole history of punishment institutions,
from the late Middle Ages to the 1930s,
according to this basic principle. Thus, when
in the 16th century Europe was affected by
a huge demographic crisis (in part as a
consequence of the Thirty Years War), the
labor force became scarce and wages started
to grow. These circumstances prompted sev-
eral European states to revise their policies
toward the poor: those who were able-bodied
had to be put to work. The imposition of
work would deal with two crucial issues at
once: on the one hand, the social problems
created by the visible presence of beggars,
and on the other hand, the decline of capital-
ist profits caused by rising wages. Inspired
by this new philosophy of poverty, the first
institutions for the confinement of the poor
spread throughout Europe: the Bridewell
in England, the Hpital General in France,
the Zuchtaus and the Spinnhaus in the
Netherlands. Confinement emerged as an
alternative to corporal punishments for the
control of the marginal classes: its utility
went beyond the segregation of socially
undesirable populations (poor, beggars, pros-
titutes or criminals) from the rest of society,
to include the possibility to transform
through discipline the unruly criminal into
a productive worker.
The future transformations of the peniten-
tiary would also be influenced by changes in
the labor markets. According to Rusche and
Kirchheimer, labor market dynamics explain
the emergence of the Philadelphian model
(based on solitary confinement), its later
crisis, and the ultimate prevalence of the
Auburn model (based on work in common
during daytime and solitary confinement
at night) in the USA a country whose capi-
talist economy was suffering an acute short-
age of labor in a period of rapid industrial
development.
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 44
In Europe, by contrast, the significant
size of the industrial reserve army of labor
throughout much of the 19th century led to
an increase in penal severity and prompted
the demise of the idea of a productive prison
in favor of a purely punitive model of solitary
confinement (Rusche and Kirchheimer,
1939 [2003]: 1337). Toward the end of the
19th century, when the rise of an organized
working class and changes in the labor
market led to an improvement of the living
standards of the poor, penal policies changed
again: social policies were implemented in
order to deal with a working class in turmoil,
and a new climate of penal tolerance spread
throughout European prisons.
At the end of their historical analysis,
Rusche and Kirchheimer hypothesized a fur-
ther shift toward the replacement of incar-
ceration by monetary sanctions. This section,
less convincing than the first part of the book,
is the result of Kirchheimers later reworking
of Rusches original manuscript.4
THE PRISON AND THE FACTORY:
PUNISHMENT AS CLASS CONTROL
After its publication in 1939, Punishment
and Social Structure was almost ignored
for a long time, both by penal historians
and criminologists. Its politico-economic
critique of punishment virtually disappeared
from the purview of criminological theory
until a second edition of the book appeared
in 1969, prompting a revival of Rusche and
Kirchheimers structural perspective within
the emerging field of critical criminology.
Both the initial oblivion and the subsequent
interest in the political economy of punish-
ment have a historical explanation: the first
edition of Rusche and Kirchheimers work
appeared in a period characterized by a
strong adversity to Marxism in the USA and
to the social sciences in Europe. The emer-
gence of totalitarian regimes, the Second
World War, and later the postwar reconstruc-
tion with its technocratic approach to social
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 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
problems (including crime), all conjured
against the success of Punishment and Social
Structure and its materialist perspective. It
was only in the transformed cultural atmos-
phere of the 1960s and 1970s that the struc-
tural critique elaborated by Rusche and
Kirchheimer could be rediscovered. Although
not always inspired by the neo-Marxist
framework, the revisionist histories of pun-
ishment that appeared between the late 1960s
and the early 1980s signaled the broad influ-
ence (whether acknowledged or not) of
Punishment and Social Structure (Platt, 1969;
Foucault, 1977; Ignatieff, 1978; Melossi and
Pavarini, 1981).5
Elsewhere I have analyzed the relation-
ship between Marxist theory and the emer-
gence of radical histories of punishment
(De Giorgi, 2006: 919). Here I will concen-
trate specifically on Melossi and Pavarinis
The Prison and the Factory, since this is
the most systematic attempt to develop a
politico-economic critique of the history of
the prison. This work situates the birth of the
penitentiary in the specific phase of capitalist
development that Marx describes as primi-
tive accumulation (Marx, 1867 [1976]: 873
940). In its early stages, capitalism had to
create the conditions for its own develop-
ment, and this required first of all the crea-
tion of a capitalist labor force. In order to
establish a new system of production based
on wage labor, capital had first to separate
the producers from the means of production,
unraveling the economic structure of feudal
society; then, it had to transform the dis-
possessed populations generated by that
dissolution into a unified and disciplined
working class.
Capitalism liberated labor from feudal
exploitation only to subject it to a purely
economic form of subordination. Thus, the
liberation of work took the form of an
expropriation of producers, replacing one
kind of enslavement with another:
Hence, the historical movement which changes
the producers into wage-workers, appears, on
the one hand, as their emancipation from serf-
dom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 45
45
side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But,
on the other hand, these new freedmen became
sellers of themselves only after they had been
robbed of all their own means of production, and
of the guarantees of existence afforded by the old
feudal arrangements. (Marx, 1867 [1976]: 875)
The consolidation of the factory system gave
birth to the process Marx defined as real
subsumption of labor under capital (1867
[1976]: 10348). In the wake of capitalisms
struggle to establish itself as a new mode of
production, the various typologies of pre-
capitalist work are subsumed under the gen-
eral form of abstract wage labor. Independent
producers are transformed into a social labor
force, and the collective worker replaces the
individual worker:
[W]ith the development of the real subsumption
of labor under capital, or the specifically capitalist
mode of production, the real lever of the overall
labor process is not the individual worker. Instead,
labor-power socially combined and the various
competing labor powers, which together form
the entire production machine, participate in very
different ways in the immediate process of
making commodities, or, more accurately in this
context, creating the product. (Marx, 1867 [1976]:
103940)
Penal institutions played a crucial role in the
historical process of subsumption of labor
under capital. The penitentiary emerged as
an institution ancillary to the factory, as a
penal technology whose power effects were
consistent with the requirements of an emerg-
ing industrial system of production. The
unfolding of a disciplinary penal regime con-
nects the internal dynamics of the prison
(both in its material and ideological forms)
to the transformations taking place in the
sphere of production. The logic of penal dis-
cipline characterizes all the institutions of
confinement that emerged since the end of
the 17th century:
Over and above their specific functions, one over-
all aim united them: control over a rising prole-
tariat. The bourgeois state assigns to all of them
a directing role in the various moments of the
formation, production and reproduction of the
factory proletariat: for society they are essential
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 46 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
instruments of social control, the aim of which is
to secure for capital a workforce which by virtue
of its moral attitude, physical health, intellectual
capacity, orderliness, obedience, etc. will readily
adapt to the whole regime of factory life and pro-
duce the maximum amount of surplus labor.
(Melossi and Pavarini, 1981: 42)
A new class of individuals is shaped by
the penitentiary institution. The mission of
the prison is to inculcate new habits into the
minds and bodies of the expropriated masses,
turning these unruly subjects into a disci-
plined labor force that, having interiorized
an entirely new concept of time and space,
will be ready to obey, execute orders, and
comply with the rhythms of production
dictated by the capitalist division of labor
(Thompson, 1967). Thus, the penal institu-
tion transforms the poor into a criminal,
the criminal into a prisoner and, finally, the
prisoner into a proletarian.
Outside the prison, in the factory, the
disciplined body of the individual proletar-
ian will be associated with other bodies,
and the capitalist organization of labor will
turn this collective worker into a source of
surplus-value:
This discipline is the basic condition for the
extraction of surplus-value, and is the only real
lesson that bourgeois society has to propose
to the proletariat. If legal ideology rules outside
production, within it reign servitude and inequal-
ity. But the place of production is the factory.
Thus, the institutional function of the workhouses
and later of the prisons was to teach the prole-
tariat factory discipline. (Melossi and Pavarini,
1981: 195)
Unlike Rusche and Kirchheimer, who had
focused exclusively on the instrumental role
of penal institutions in the material reproduc-
tion of a capitalist labor force, Melossi and
Pavarini insist on the crucial contribution
provided by disciplinary penal technologies
to the ideological reproduction of capitalist
relations of production. The prison is surely
a repressive institution because it imposes
to its confined populations a regime of depri-
vation and complete subordination to author-
ity. But it is also an ideological tool because
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 46
it represents the unconditional acceptance of
that subordination as the only way to break
free one day from this condition. Thus,
the prison creates, on the one hand, the con-
dition of prisoner, and it imposes, on the
other, the prisoners subjection to a regime of
labor, obedience and discipline (elements
that constitute that very condition) as the
only path to freedom. In this way, the suffer-
ing generated by the prison is ideologically
represented as the consequence of the pris-
oners own refusal to submit to the discipline
of work.
The ideological normalization of the
prison is also reinforced by the contractual
logic of imprisonment as a punishment whose
severity is measured by time:
Deprivation of freedom, for a period stipulated
in the court sentence, is the specific form in
which modern, that is to say bourgeois-capitalist,
criminal law embodies the principle of equivalent
recompense. This form is unconsciously yet
deeply linked with the conception of man in the
abstract and abstract human labor measurable in
time. (Pashukanis, 1978: 1801)
The capitalistic principle of the exchange
of equivalents provides ideological legiti-
macy to the sanction of imprisonment through
the same mystification that makes a work
contract fair: in both cases, exploitation,
violence and subordination disappear from
the smooth logic of the contractual reason.
The legal fiction of punishment as retribu-
tion conceals the disciplinary dimension of
the prison in the same way as the economic
fiction of the work contract as an exchange
of equivalents conceals the exploitative
dimension of wage labor.
THE LIMITS OF THE OLD
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
PUNISHMENT
In an excoriating review of the 1939 edition
of Punishment and Social Structure pub-
lished on the March-April 1940 issue of the
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 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
American legal theorist Jerome Hall came to
the following conclusions about the signifi-
cance of Rusche and Kirchheimers work:
[D]espite the importance of the thesis, abundant
descriptive data, and many acute observations,
the study falls far short of being an important
contribution to our present knowledge. For it
becomes rather quickly apparent that the authors
social situation, and historical-sociological analy-
sis of penal methods simmer down to economic
influence and economic becomes sometimes
the conditions of the labor market, occasionally
methods of production, often the bias of domi-
nant economic classes, usually the bourgeoisie.
As a consequence it is impossible to determine
just what their thesis is. The most persistent cur-
rent of their debate suggests, but never explicitly,
Marxist determinism. (1940: 9712)
Jerome Hall was not alone in accusing Pun-
ishment and Social Structure of economic
determinism; indeed other early reviewers
agreed, although sometimes in a less
acrimonious tone, that this was the books
main theoretical flaw. For example, in a
review published in The Economic Journal,
renowned British sociologist T.H. Marshall
argued that the authors try to press their
point too far and to make everything fit in
too neatly, adding in particular that as soon
as their analysis focused on the 19th century
(and on the emergence of modern prisons),
the simple correlation between penal meth-
ods and economic systems breaks down
(Marshall, 1940: 1267). A few months later,
David Riesman Jr added his voice to the
choir, stating that Rusche and Kirchheimers
analysis neglected the role of politics,
religion and culture in penal transformation,
and concluding that social scientists have
a right to demand an analysis of the plural-
ity of factors, and an attempt to assign a
proper weight to each (1940: 1299). Finally,
Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess reit-
erated in his own review of the book that
the authors overemphasize the relation of
crime to economic conditions and ignore or
minimize cultural and psychogenic factors
(1940: 986).
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 47
47
Despite having attracted the early attention
of such prestigious scholars, Punishment and
Social Structure would almost disappear
from the criminological landscape for almost
thirty years. Once the book reemerged from
oblivion, the charge of economic reduction-
ism and/or determinism would haunt again
Rusche and Kirchheimers work, along with
the materialist critique of punishment built
on it. Thus, in one of the founding texts in
the field of punishment and society, David
Garland concluded his chapter on the politi-
cal economy of punishment suggesting that:
Punishment and Social Structure seriously overes-
timates the effective role of economic forces
in shaping penal practice. It grossly understates
the importance of ideological and political forces
and has little to say about the internal dynamics
of penal administration and their role in determin-
ing policy. It gives no account of the symbols
and social messages conveyed by penal measures
to the law-abiding public and hence no sense of
the ways in which these symbolic concerns help
shape the fabric of penal institutions. (Garland,
1990: 1089)
It is not surprising that these critiques
became particularly strong during the 1980s
and 1990s, when, as Dario Melossi writes
in his introduction to the third edition of
Rusche and Kirchheimers book, Marxism
was symbolically burnt at the stake, while
honoring the totem pole of cultural insight
(2003: ix). What is slightly more surprising,
however, is that the distancing of critical
sociologies of punishment from the struc-
tural approach took place despite the fact
that in those years advanced capitalist socie-
ties were witnessing the most significant
process of structural transformation since the
Industrial Revolution. In fact, those decades
witnessed the crisis of the Fordist-industrial
paradigm, the demise of the Keynesian wel-
fare state, the globalization of production and
consumption, the consolidation of a neolib-
eral model of socioeconomic (de)regulation6,
and particularly in the USA the unfolding
of a punitive turn that would lead to a radical
reconfiguration of the penal landscape.
However, with the notable exception of Stuart
4/24/2012 3:02:27 PM
 48 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
Halls (1978) analysis of the role of penal
discourses in the reproduction class (and
racial) hegemony in late capitalism (see also
Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), the cultural turn
in the sociology of punishment coincided
with (and to some extent encouraged) a
rejection of the Marxist political economy at
a time when this was most needed in order
to elaborate a grounded critique of penal
change7.
This is not to suggest that the traditional
politico-economic analysis, with its reduc-
tive focus on the relationship between unem-
ployment and imprisonment (Jankovic, 1977;
Greenberg, 1980; Wallace, 1980; Galster
and Scaturo, 1985; Inverarity and McCarthy,
1988), had been able to elaborate a persua-
sive structural critique of contemporary
punishment; nor to argue that an exclusive
emphasis on punishment as an instrument
of class control would provide an exhaustive
explanation of the transformations of penal
politics in contemporary societies. Indeed,
from the standpoint of what I would define
as a post-reductionist political economy
of punishment, the challenge is to envision
a non-orthodox critique of penal strategies
that is able to overcome the false alterna-
tive between structure and culture while where more culture seems to imply less
addressing the important theoretical concerns
raised by other critical perspectives in the
field of punishment and society.
In this respect, I would suggest that at least
three main themes addressed by recent narra-
tives of penal change (particularly in the
USA) deserve the attention of neo-Marxist
criminologists:
1 the already mentioned issue of the symbolic
dimension of punishment, which points to the
materialist frameworks excessive focus on the
instrumental side of penal practices;
2 the issue of the broader governmental effects
generated by penal strategies, which points
to the neo-Marxist paradigms narrow focus
on socioeconomic marginality as the exclusive
target of penal technologies;
3 the issue of the specific politico-institutional
contexts that define the background against
which specific forms of penality unfold, which
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 48
points to the tendency of the political economy
of punishment to favor global accounts of penal
transformation over comparative analysis.
In some cases, these theoretical concerns
have emerged from works directly or indi-
rectly engaged with the neo-Marxist pers-
pective (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Lacey,
2008; Wacquant, 2009), while in others they
emerged from critical analyses of penality
the background of which is rather distant
from the materialist paradigm (Simon, 2007;
Barker, 2009). I suggest that we engage with
each of these themes, since they shed light on
relevant dimensions of the penal question
that have been left underexplored by the old
political economy of punishment.
The first theme points to one of the most
persistent critiques addressed to neo-Marxist
criminology: its apparent lack of interest
for the cultural, expressive, and discursive
dimensions of penality. While this critique
is clearly well grounded, it is worth noting
here that the emphasis on the symbolic dimen-
sions of punishment has often come at the
cost of deemphasizing (if not ignoring) the
historically determined structural dimensions
of penality, almost in a kind of zero-sum logic
structure (see for example Garland, 1990,
2001). Recently, the issue of the culture/
structure schism has resurfaced in Loic
Wacquants (2009) analysis of neoliberal
penality and of the emergence of an American
penal state. This work aims explicitly at
bridging the gap between instrumental and
symbolic dimensions of punishment. In the
very first pages of his Punishing the Poor,
in fact, Wacquant states that his work does
not belong to the genre of the political
economy of imprisonment inaugurated by
the classic work of Georg Rusche and
Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social
Structure, since its ambition is:
[t]o hold together the material and symbolic
dimensions of the contemporary restructuring of
the economy of punishment that this tradition
of research has precisely been unable to wed,
owing to its congenital incapacity to recognize the
4/24/2012 3:02:27 PM
 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
specific efficacy and the materiality of symbolic
power. (2009: xvii)
Wacquant argues that the unfolding of the
American penal experiment over the last
three decades should not be interpreted
as the leitmotiv of the old political economy
of punishment would suggest as a simple
reflection of the transition from a Fordist-
industrial model of production based on
stable labor markets, extensive networks of
social protection, and inclusive welfare
policies, to a post-Fordist economic system
based on deregulated labor markets, flexible
working conditions, and weak social pro-
tections. Indeed, an exclusive focus on the
instrumental dimension of the new punitive-
ness would prevent a deeper understanding
of the significance of the American penal
state as a broader political project.
According to Wacquant, the emerging
penal state would pursue three distinct strate-
gies with both instrumental and symbolic
outcomes. At the instrumental level, the
American penal experiment would entail a
massive warehousing of the surplus popula-
tions generated by the restructuring of
the Fordist-industrial economy. In turn, by
increasing the cost of any attempt to escape
from the lowest regions of the labor market
(according to the well known principle of
less eligibility) this new great confinement
would contribute to impart a new discipline
of labor on the marginal sectors of the post-
industrial workforce. Finally, at the symbolic
level, the new penal discourse would appease
the growing insecurities experienced by the
middle class, by staging a ritual reassertion
of the states power to neutralize the unwor-
thy and dangerous classes.
In other words, the tentacles of the penal
state would extend deeply into the fabric of
American society, reshaping both at the
instrumental and symbolic level its public
sphere, its political institutions and its cul-
tural orientations. Distancing himself from
the reductionist tendency of the political
economy of punishment, Wacquant suggests
that the punitive turn leads not only to the
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 49
49
consolidation of a repressive machine whose
operations are functional to the reproduction
of current capitalist relations, but also to
the configuration of new categories and dis-
courses, novel administrative bodies and
government policies, fresh social types and
associated forms of knowledge (2009: 295).
Wacquants attempt to assign proper
weight to the discursive and symbolic
effects of penal politics provides important
insights towards a post-reductionist revision
of the materialist critique of punishment.
Yet, the image that emerges most often from
the pages of Punishing the Poor is that of a
penal state involved in a struggle to regulate
(by repressive means) the most precarious
sectors of the post-industrial labor force,
while less emphasis is given to its symbolic
reach across other regions of American
society. Thus, despite Wacquants insistence
on the necessity to escape the narrowly
materialist vision of the political economy
of punishment (2009: xviii), his approach
risks to reproduce the much contested
material/symbolic divide. Not unlike other
materialist critiques of penality, indeed,
Wacquants work seems to come to the
conclusion that the neoliberal penal state
reveals its instrumental side against the new
poor, while projecting its purely symbolic
hold on the rest of society specifically, on
the middle classes it struggles to reassure by
allowing them to witness the punitive excess
unleashed against the new dangerous classes.
In other words, Punishing the Poor might be
less distant from the traditional politico-eco-
nomic critique of punishment than its author
acknowledges, since once again the symbolic
and discursive dimensions of penal politics
appear mostly as ideological outgrowths
of a penal state whose main role is to puni-
tively regulate the poor in order to force them
into the post-Fordist labor market. Finally,
we are left with our unsolved dilemma:
how can the symbolic and instrumental
dimensions of punishment be reconnected
under a comprehensive structural critique of
penal change? How do penal discourses and
practices consolidate themselves as powerful
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 50 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
technologies for governing not just social
marginality, but late-capitalist/neoliberal
societies at large?
This question points to the issue of the
broader governmental effects generated by
penal discourses and practices in contempo-
rary societies. In its basic formulation, this
theme draws on the Foucauldian insight that
penal practices, as historically determined
technologies of power, are always inscribed
within broader rationalities of government.
Thus, according to Foucaults genealogy,
the emergence of modern penality (with the
transition from the spectacle of suffering to
the consolidation of disciplinary technolo-
gies) would mirror a broader shift from a
destructive sovereign power that struggles to
neutralize its enemies to a productive govern-
mental rationality engaged in the efficient
regulation of whole populations (Foucault,
2009: 117). It is worth emphasizing the con-
nection, often overlooked, between Foucaults
theorization of the power to punish and the
neo-Marxist analysis of capitalist reproduc-
tion, particularly in light of the French phi-
losophers own emphasis on the role played
by the emergence of a capitalist political
economy in the unfolding of modern
governmental rationalities (Foucault, 2009:
1067). What matters the most here, how-
ever, is Foucaults insistence that penal
strategies (and governmental technologies in
general) should not be seen simply as repres-
sive tools for the control of the poor, but
rather as elements of broader rationalities for
the governing of entire social formations.
Following this perspective, in a recent
work Jonathan Simon (2007) situates his
critique of the American penal experiment
within a theoretical framework that is rather
distant from the one advanced by Rusche and
Kirchheimer. The level privileged by Simon
is that of a socio-legal and political analy-
sis of the governmental rationalities that
emerged as a consequence of the increasing
centrality of the penal question in the USA.
In the last 30 years, the ongoing proliferation
of discourses, practices and knowledge on
crime and punishment would have resulted
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 50
in a distinct governmental rationality that
Simon calls governing through crime:
When we govern through crime, we make
crime and the forms of knowledge historically
associated with it available outside their limited
original subject domains as powerful tools with
which to interpret and frame all forms of social
action as a problem for governance. (2007: 17)
Simon offers a rigorous genealogy of this
new governmental rationality, whose origins
can be situated in the legimation crisis
affecting the liberal-welfarist forms of gov-
ernance that had been hegemonic in the
USA for most of the 20th century. Simon
reconstructs the concatenation of discur-
sive events that provided the symbolic back-
ground for the unfolding of the American
punitive turn from Goldwaters incendiary
1964 electoral campaign, to the wars on
crime and drugs launched by Nixon, Reagan
and Bush Sr, to the war on terror declared
by George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.
All these transformations have converged
toward a new paradigm of social governance
based on the prevention and neutralization
of criminal risks as a constitutive element of
governmental action at all levels of American
society.
This Foucauldian perspective eschews a
top-down concept of penal power common
to much neo-Marxist criminology, and
describes the punitive turn from the point
of view of both its politico-institutional con-
sequences and the diffusion of lifestyles,
cultures of work, and patterns of consump-
tion revolving around the crime-punishment
nexus. Simon deconstructs, on the one,hand
the peculiar governmental technologies that
emerged around this punitive shift, and on
the other, the discursive chains that allowed
these rationalities to resonate with punitive
and neo-authoritarian declinations of fear
and insecurity in a neoliberal society. If ana-
lyzed under this particular lens, the punitive
turn appears as a broad social dynamic whose
power effects are constantly reproduced
through the daily interactions between
citizens (not only the poor) and a power to
4/24/2012 3:02:27 PM
 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
punish that is part of a broader strategy for
regulating the social.
However, I would suggest, this reconfigu-
ration of governmental technologies is
not disconnected from the deep structural
inequalities affecting the social and urban
landscape of American society. The molecu-
lar diffusion of the power effects associated
with this new model of governing through
crime does not mean that such effects
spread evenly. Although we can agree with
Simon that we should focus on both the
criminal justice system that is concen-
trated on poor communities and the pri-
vate sector of middle-class securitized
environments as class-specific modes of gov-
erning through crime that interact with each
other (Simon, 2007: 7), we also need to
emphasize that these rationalities of govern-
ment do not generate similar (or even compa-
rable) effects at different latitudes of the
American socioeconomic hierarchy. The
neo-Foucauldian argument that crime does
not govern only those on one end of struc-
tures of inequality (Simon, 2007: 18) needs
to be qualified by the Marxist insight that
penal strategies contribute to the overall
reproduction of those very structures of
socioeconomic inequality, in directions that
resonate with current dynamics of capitalist
accumulation.
Furthermore, the actual configuration of
this symbiotic relationship between penal
technologies and socioeconomic processes
cannot be taken for granted, nor can it be
presumed to unfold along the same coordi-
nates across all late-capitalist societies. This
question sheds light on the third theme I
would like to discuss here: the specific
politico-institutional arrangements through
which the relations between punishment and
social structure are mediated. Such issue
also points to what recently John Sutton has
identified as a serious theoretical flaw in
the political economy of punishment: its ten-
dency to assume that all capitalist econo-
mies are the same and that business cycles
are wholly exogenous to other kinds of social
processes (Sutton, 2004: 171).
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 51
51
The issue of the lack of comparative insti-
tutional analysis in neo-Marxist accounts of
penal change has been recently raised in par-
ticular by theoretical perspectives directly
engaged with (if not internal to) the politico-
economic framework (Sutton, 2004; Cavadino
and Dignan, 2006; Lacey, 2008). In The
Prisoners Dilemma, for example, Nicola
Lacey clearly situates her analysis in the
materialist field, broadly accepting the
politico-economic argument that current
penal trends must be linked to the socioeco-
nomic transformations affecting late capital-
ist societies. However, rather than assuming
a global spread of the neoliberal ideology
sustained by a uniform shift toward penal
severity, Lacey offers a detailed comparative
analysis of the different varieties of capital-
ism existing in the Western world (Hall
and Soskice, 2001), and suggests that their
specific features must be given proper weight
in the analysis of punishment and social
structure:
My analysis builds on structural theories inspired
by Marxism, but it argues that political-economic
forces at the macro level are mediated not only
by cultural filters, but also by economic, political,
and social institutions It is this institutional
stabilization of and mediation of cultural and
structural forces, and the impact which this has
on the perceived interests of relevant groups of
social actors, which produce the significant and
persistent variation across systems at similar stages
of capitalist development. (Lacey, 2008: 57)
According to Lacey, the American shift
toward a punitive governance of social mar-
ginality has not spread to all advanced
capitalist democracies, and the specific con-
figurations of the punitive turn (where it has
indeed taken place) cannot be automatically
derived from the emergence of a post-indus-
trial, neoliberal economy. Instead, different
capitalist social formations show diverging
trends. If some neoliberal market economies
such as the USA (and to a much more limited
extent, the UK) have witnessed a significant
transition from social to penal means for
governing the poor, this has not been the
case in the social-democratic or corporatist
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 52 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
economies of continental Europe, where in
the last few decades welfare protections have
not been drastically reduced and indicators of
penal severity have remained relatively
stable. In this sense, social-democratic and
corporatist economies would seem to be
better positioned than their neoliberal coun-
terparts to resist the punitive turn (despite
their own problems of rising unemployment
and growing social inequality), thanks to
their politico-economic and institutional
structures based on stable labor markets,
long-term public investments in the work-
force, coalition-oriented electoral politics,
and greater insulation of the judiciary from
the ebbs and flows of public opinion (see
also Cavadino and Dignan, 2006: 339).
Conversely, in neoliberal economic forma-
tions characterized by flexible labor mar-
kets, low levels of investment in public
services, two-party political systems, a single-
issue orientation in political debate, and
a hegemonic orientation favoring individual
competitiveness over social equality the
most disruptive consequences of the crisis
of the industrial economy (namely, the pro-
duction of a large surplus of labor) would
unfold in a politico-institutional context that
facilitates the shift toward a more punitive
model of social regulation. Lacey suggests
that in order to be able to explain both
the punitive shift of neoliberal societies and
the relative penal moderation of other late-
capitalist social formations, the materialist
approach needs to be grounded in a compara-
tive analysis of the institutional, political and
cultural arrangements which, in each variety
of capitalism, mediate (and sometimes
mitigate) the effect of economic forces on
penal politics.
Taken together, the three themes dis-
cussed the symbolic dimension of penality,
the governmental effects of penal politics
and the different politico-institutional con-
texts in which penal practices unfold can
assist neo-Marxist criminology in its effort
to overcome some of the old conundrums of
materialist criminology. Indeed, as far as
they are not seen as alternatives to structural
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 52
explanations of penal change, these themes
are not incompatible with a politico-
economic critique of penality. Instead, as I
will argue more extensively in the final sec-
tion of this chapter, they can help us envision
a conceptual roadmap for the construction
of a post-reductionist, culturally sensitive
political economy of punishment.
NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF PUNISHMENT
In the 1933 article which outlined the thesis
to be later developed in Punishment and
Social Structure, Georg Rusche had already
been careful to emphasize the complexity of
the relationship between economic structure
and penal forms:
The dependency of crime and crime control
on economic and historical conditions does
not, however, provide a total explanation. These
forces do not alone determine the object of our
investigation and by themselves are limited and
incomplete in several ways. (1933 [1978]: 3)
This early warning against oversimplified
interpretations of the economy/punishment
nexus would not inoculate the political econ-
omy of punishment against the dangers of
economic determinism. It must also be said
that the reductionist drift would indeed become
particularly evident in the neo-Marxist
criminological literature of the 1970s and
1980s, whose attempts to apply Rusche and
Kirchheimers paradigm to late-capitalist
societies focused on narrow statistical analy-
ses of the relationship between changes
in the labor market and variations in impris-
onment rates (for a review see Chiricos and
DeLone, 1992; Melossi, 1998; De Giorgi,
2006: 1939). This literature was for the
most part able to provide empirical support
to the hypothesis of a positive and direct
correlation between unemployment and
incarceration and to show how, in accordance
with Rusche and Kirchheimers insights,
penal severity tended to increase in times of
4/24/2012 3:02:27 PM
 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
economic crisis and rising unemployment.
However, the narrowly quantitative approach
to socioeconomic change privileged by most
of these analyses (perhaps in an attempt to
give scientific validation to the materialist
approach through the use of ever more com-
plex statistical models), has prevented a
deeper understanding of the extra-economic
and extra-penal factors that contribute to
structure this relationship (for notable excep-
tions see Box, 1987; Melossi, 1993, 2000).
The reductionist tendency of the political
economy of punishment has resulted in an
unnecessary oversimplification of Rusche
and Kirchheimers perspective, which in
turn has deprived the materialist framework
of the theoretical tools it needs in order to
elaborate a comprehensive critique of the
capitalist restructuring that has unfolded in
Western societies since the early 1970s. This
broad process of socioeconomic transforma-
tion has certainly involved (particularly in
the early stage of the transition) a massive
expulsion of the labor force from the indus-
trial sectors of the economy, as shown by
the vertical growth of unemployment rates
between the late 1970s and the early 1980s.
More importantly, however, it has resulted
in a deep restructuring of the specific regime
of capitalist accumulation that had been
hegemonic in Europe and (to a lesser extent)
in the USA between the 1930s and the
1960s.
The concept of regime of accumulation
has been elaborated by neo-Marxist political
economists belonging to the so called regu-
lation school (see Aglietta, 1979; Jessop,
1990). This perspective reconstructs the his-
torical trajectory of capitalist development in
light of the contradictory tendency of capital-
ism to generate crises and instabilities, on the
one hand, and to consolidate new institu-
tions, new norms, and new cultural orienta-
tions in response to those crises, on the other
hand.8 According to this perspective (Jessop,
2002: 568), each different regime of capital-
ist accumulation can be described accord-
ing to four main elements: (1) a distinctive
type of labor process, which identifies the
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 53
53
dominant form of production and the corre-
sponding composition of the workforce (e.g.
mass production, the industrial working
class); (2) a specific strategy of macroeco-
nomic growth, which identifies the leading
sectors of an economic formation (e.g. indus-
trial production, manufacturing); (3) a par-
ticular system of economic regulation, which
describes the prevailing regulatory frame-
work (e.g. collective bargaining, market reg-
ulation, monetary policies); and (4) a coherent
mode of societalization, which identifies the
hegemonic forms of cultural, institutional,
and social organization (e.g. cultures of wel-
fare, fiscal policies, patterns of consumption,
etc.).
According to this perspective, the Fordist-
Keynesian regime of capitalist accumulation
was based on a system of mass-industrial
production centered on the assembly line,
stable labor markets regulated by compre-
hensive industrial policies, high levels of
labor unionization favored by an extended
system of collective bargaining, significant
public interventions in the economy, cultural
orientations favoring mass consumption, and
a tacit social pact between labor and capital
(often mediated by an interventionist state)
according to which high wages and generous
social protections would reward high levels
of labor productivity and work discipline.
Bob Jessop summarizes the internal consist-
ency between the economic, institutional,
and cultural dimensions of this specific
regime of accumulation as follows:
If the Keynesian welfare national state helped
secure the conditions for Fordist economic expan-
sion, Fordist economic expansion helped secure
the conditions for the Keynesian welfare national
state. Welfare rights based on national citizenship
helped to generalize norms of mass consump-
tion and thereby contributed to full employ-
ment levels of demand; and they were sustained
in turn by an institutionalized compromise
involving Fordist unions and Fordist firms. (Jessop,
2002: 79)
The gradual demise in Western economies
of this model of capitalist development
during the 1970s was prompted by several
4/24/2012 3:02:27 PM
 54 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
crisis-generating features of the Fordist-
Keynesian paradigm, such as the steady
decline in capitalist profits produced by the
radicalization of class struggles, the fiscal
crisis of the welfare state precipitated by
increasing demands for social provisions
(coupled, particularly in the USA, with the
rise of anti-tax movements), the inflationary
tendencies generated by high wages and
high welfare expenditures, the saturation of
domestic markets for durable goods, and the
loss of competitive advantage suffered by
Western economies in the wake of economic
globalization.
In liberal societies such as the USA, whose
economic history has traditionally leaned
toward a laissez-faire model of capitalist
development based on deregulated markets,
minimal public interventions in the economy,
and a system of social protections resem-
bling a charitable state (Wacquant, 2009:
48), the dismantling of the Fordist-Keynesian
regime has unfolded in a neoliberal variant
characterized by extreme labor market flexi-
bility, a vertical decline in labor unionization,
a drastic curtailment of welfare provisions
and soaring levels of socioeconomic inequal-
ity (Sennett, 1998; Shipler, 2004; Katz and
Stern, 2006). In this respect, the crisis of
the Fordist-Keynesian paradigm and the
concurring process of capitalist restructur-
ing have involved much more than the expul-
sion of a significant fraction of the industrial
labor force from the system of production
the only aspect captured by a narrow focus
on unemployment and imprisonment.
Indeed, the transition to a post-Fordist/post-
Keynesian regime of accumulation has taken
the form of a broad capitalist offensive
against the workforce, in a successful attempt
to break the Fordist-Keynesian compromise
and to reestablish suitable conditions for
profitable capitalist accumulation in a global
economy: a stricter work discipline, higher
levels of labor flexibility, more insecure
working conditions, lower social protec-
tions, and an increased competition for work
among the poor. This process of capitalist
restructuring resulted in a significant shift in
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 54
the balance of power from labor to capital.
As Melossi puts it, sometimes in the mid-
1970s the social system started squeezing
the working class for the juice of production,
not with only one hand, but with two hands
at the same time (2003: XXV).
It is in the context of this broader realign-
ment of social power throughout the structure
of late capitalist societies that a materialist
analysis of contemporary penal change must
situate its critique. And such a critique must
be able to take into account not only the
measurable dynamics of the labor market,
but also the political, institutional, and cul-
tural transformations that have contributed to
redefine existing structures of socioeconomic
inequality in the wake of a new emerging
regime of capitalist accumulation.
In order to illustrate some of the theore-
tical implications of this qualitative shift,
I will return once again to Rusches original
formulation of the concept of less eligibility
as the logic governing the relation between
punishment and social structure:
All efforts to reform the punishment of criminals
are inevitably limited by the situation of the lowest
socially significant proletarian class which society
wants to deter for criminal acts. All reform efforts,
however humanitarian and well-meaning, which
go beyond this restriction, are condemned to uto-
pianism. (Rusche, 1933 [1978]: 4, emphasis
added)
Here I would argue that Rusches concept
of the situation of the lowest socially sig-
nificant proletarian class (1933: 4) lends
itself to a much broader conceptualization
than the narrowly economistic approach
privileged by most of the literature on unem-
ployment and imprisonment: one that encour-
ages a productive integration between the
traditional materialist critique of punishment
and some of the theoretical issues raised by
the recent sociologies of the punitive turn.
Indeed, if the relative power of the work-
force in a capitalist economy is ultimately
determined by the economic value of its
labor,9 the overall situation of that workforce
its contingent position inside existing
4/24/2012 3:02:28 PM
 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
hierarchies of social worthiness, or its social
value is not simply the product of narrow
economic dynamics. Rather, it results from
the ongoing interaction between structural
processes of economic transformation (modes
of production, patterns of economic growth,
labor market dynamics), governmental tech-
nologies of social regulation (varieties of
welfare/workfare, strategies of public inter-
vention in the economy, politico-institutional
arrangements, modes of economic regula-
tion/deregulation, patterns of wealth redistri-
bution/concentration), and discursive/
symbolic dynamics of cultural reproduction
(racialized and gendered taxonomies of social
worth, mainstream narratives about social
deservingness and undeservingness). In other
words, the overall situation of marginalized
social classes is determined by their place
in the economic structure as much as by their
position in the moral economy of capitalist
social formations (Sayer, 2001). It should
be noted here that this ongoing process of
redefinition of the economic and social worth
of labor represents a constant feature in the
history of capitalism, and that the trajectory
of this repositioning of the labor force in
the social structure tends to follow a clear
pattern: the overall situation of the marginal
classes tends to improve when a stable
dynamic of capitalist valorization guarantees
extended periods of economic growth and
social stability, while it tends to deteriorate
when the crisis of a specific mode of devel-
opment prompts capitalist social formations
to revolutionize the system of production and
spark a new regime of accumulation (Marx,
1867 [1976]: 896904).
Following this perspective, a post-
reductionist political economy of the puni-
tive turn in the USA should analyze the
changing situation of the marginal classes
in America against the background of the
economic and extra-economic processes
that have redefined the position of the poor
within the material and moral economy of
American society. Over the last three dec-
ades, structural processes of capitalist trans-
formation (deindustrialization, downsizing,
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 55
55
outsourcing, etc.) have significantly reduced
the economic value of wage labor and con-
solidated a tendency toward rising work
insecurity, declining wages, longer working
hours, and an overall increase in the socially
acceptable levels of exploitability of the
American labor force (Schor, 1992; Sennett,
1998; Ehrenreich, 2001). At the same time,
however, a broad reconfiguration of govern-
mental strategies of social regulation such
as the transition from welfare to workfare,
the growing politico-institutional emphasis
on individual responsibility, and the emer-
gence of neoliberal forms of governance that
encourage the secession of the successful
in fields like taxation, housing, education,
etc. (Reich, 1991) has eroded the Fordist-
Keynesian compromise, deepening social
fractures along lines of race and class. Finally,
in the field of cultural signification, the pow-
erful neoconservative hold on public debates
on socioeconomic inequality reinforced by
the cyclical emergence of racialized moral
panics about the underclass, welfare depend-
ency, street crime and drugs, illegal immi-
gration, etc. has helped to consolidate
hegemonic representations of the poor as
undeserving and potentially dangerous
(Handler and Hasenfeld 1991; Gans, 1995;
Quadagno, 1995).
In the field of penal politics, the broad-
ened materialist framework sketched above
would allow the political economy of punish-
ment to overcome its traditional emphasis
on the instrumental side of penality, and to
analyze the emergence of the American
penal state from the point of view of its
impact on each of the different levels at
which this broad reconfiguration of the
American social structure (and of the situa-
tion of its marginalized populations) has
taken place since the 1970s. In this direction,
a post-reductionist critique of the punitive
turn should of course emphasize the struc-
tural dimension of recent penal practices,
illustrating their instrumental role in impos-
ing the discipline of desocialized wage
work by rising the cost of strategies of
escape or resistance that drive young men
4/24/2012 3:02:28 PM
 56 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY
from the lower class into the illegal sectors
of the street economy (Wacquant, 2009:
XVII). But it should also analyze the wide-
spread governmental effects of penal tech-
nologies particularly in conjunction with
other tools of socioeconomic regulation,
such as fiscal and social policies and illus-
trate their tendency to reproduce and rein-
force existing structures of socioeconomic
inequality. Most importantly, however, it
should elaborate a culturally sensitive mate-
rialist critique of the symbolic implications
of contemporary penal forms, and analyze
how hegemonic representations of deserv-
ingness and undeservingness resonate with
(and provide cultural legitimacy to) an emerg-
ing post-Fordist model of capitalist pro-
duction whose regime of accumulation is
grounded in the material and symbolic deval-
uation of the poor and their labor.
Finally, the epistemological shift proposed
here would enable neo-Marxist criminology
to approach penal politics no longer as an
outgrowth of capitalist relations of produc-
tion (a superstructure of the capitalist econ-
omy, in the language of orthodox Marxism),
but rather as a set of material and symbolic
practices that contribute to the overall repro-
duction of capitalist social formations and of
their specific regimes of accumulation.
NOTES
1 Several directions of research contributed in this
period to the consolidation of critical or radical
perspectives in criminology (radical feminism, critical
race theory, postcolonial studies, etc.), not all of
which can be ascribed to Marxism. The focus of this
chapter, however, is the political economy of punish-
ment, an approach that owes much to Marxist
theory. For a broad reconstruction of different
currents of thought in critical criminology, see
Van Swaaningen (1997), Lynch et al. (2006) and
DeKeseredy (2010).
2 It is worth noting here that a few years before
the publication of Punishment and Social Structure,
Georg Rusche had already exposed some of his ideas
in two articles. The first article, originally published in
1930 in the German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung,
5772-Simon-Ch02.indd 56
analyzed prison conditions in the USA during the
Depression era (Rusche, 1930 [1980]). The second
article, conceived as a research project for the
Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, was pub-
lished in 1933 in the Institutes journal Zeitschrift fr
Sozialforschung, and outlined the main concepts of
the materialist critique of punishment (Rusche, 1933
[1978]).
3 For an analysis of the return of corporal punish-
ment in the USA during the last quarter of the
20th century, see Cusac (2009).
4 For a broad reconstruction of the complex
history of Punishment and Social Structure, detailing
both Rusches biographic vicissitudes and the prob-
lematic reworking of the original manuscript by Otto
Kirchheimer, see Melossi (1978, 1980).
5 In the first pages of Discipline and Punish,
Michel Foucault acknowledges that Rusche and
Kirchheimers great work, Punishment and Social
Structure provides a number of essential reference
points, adding that we can surely accept the gen-
eral proposition that, in our societies, the systems
of punishment are to be situated in a certain politi-
cal economy of the body (1977: 245).
6 Following David Harveys recent work, here
I use the term neoliberalism to identify a political
project developed by Western power elites, particu-
larly in the USA and in the UK between the late
1970s and the early 2000s, in order to reestablish
the conditions for capital accumulation and to
restore the power of economic elites (Harvey, 2005:
19) after the social turbulence of the 1960s and early
1970s. As a politico-economic system, neoliberalism
emphasizes individual freedom over social responsi-
bility, competition over cooperation, market forces
over state intervention, capital mobility over financial
regulation, and corporate interests over the rights of
organized labor.
7 This statement might seem to overlook the
contributions of those authors most notably David
Garland (1985, 1990; but see also Howe, 1994)
who during the 1980s and 1990s have engaged in a
critical conversation with the political economy of
punishment. The point I would like to make here,
however, is that most of these works focused on
stigmatizing the inability of the neo-Marxist perspec-
tive to grasp the symbolic and cultural dimensions of
punishment, rather than on promoting any signifi-
cant advancement in this approach.
8 Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum have summa-
rized the distinctive approach of the regulation
school as follows: The regulation approach is a vari-
ant of evolutionary and institutional economics that
analyzes the economy in its broadest sense as includ-
ing both economic and extra-economic factors. It
interprets the economy as an ensemble of socially
embedded, socially regularized and strategically
selective institutions, organizations, social forces and
4/24/2012 3:02:28 PM
 PUNISHMENT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
actions organized around (or at least involved in)
capitalist reproduction (2001: 91, original emphasis).
9 Which in turn depends on the pressure exer-
cised on the labor market by the unemployed popu-
lation that fills the ranks of the Marxian industrial
reserve army of labor: The industrial reserve army,
during the periods of stagnation and average pros-
perity, weighs down the active army of workers;
during the periods of over-production and feverish
activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions (Marx,
1867 [1976]: 792).
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