19 - The ‘Fearsome Frowning Face of the State’ and Ex-Prisoners: Promoting Employment Or Alienation, Anger and Perpetual Punishment?

Summary

Introduction

Wacquant (2009) has argued that a transnational political process is under way to exert social control over the poor. Harsh penal policies (‘prisonfare’) and social policies (‘workfare’) seek to control marginal populations created by economic liberalism and welfare state retrenchment. Prisonfare is characterised by burgeoning prison populations and the movement of the penal system away from notions of rehabilitating inmates to merely warehousing them. This theorisation has been highly influential but was developed with close reference to the US case. The UK prison population currently stands at record levels but we have not witnessed the development of hyper-incarceration emblematic of the US approach. Similarly, UK welfare reforms have increasingly made the receipt of welfare benefits conditional on the behaviour of recipients enforced by harsh benefit sanctions. In Wacquant's (2009: 91) terms claimants are ‘saddled with abridged rights and expanded obligations’. This chapter explores the relevance of Wacquant's ideas to the UK by drawing upon new primary research that has explored offender experiences of both prisonfare and workfare.

The prison is an institution that poses unique challenges to the reintegration of ex-prisoners. The ‘free market society’ can also be viewed as a form of prison for those of limited means. However, there has been no consideration of the impact of prison on the ability of benefit claimants to meet the intensified behavioural requirements of the welfare system. This chapter begins by showing how prison intensifies the social atomisation associated with economic liberalism before articulating key welfare reforms which have intensified behavioural conditionality. The author then explores the impact of imprisonment on their ability to engage with the benefits system. A key finding is that long-term imprisonment leaves a legacy which frequently results in sanctioning and may propel many out of the welfare system and into further criminal activity.

Prison: institutionalising atomisation

Economic liberalism champions the free market liberated from the shackles of the state. Yet this erodes the social bonds and civic ties upon which market economies depend. Individuals are encouraged to maximise their own subjective choices in conditions of growing market anarchy policed by an authoritarian state, as Polanyi (2001) diagnoses in The Great Transformation.