Reading Wacquant as both ‘lumper’ and ‘splitter’

Abstract

In this short response to Loïc Wacquant's ‘Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neo-liberal City’, I outline two intellectual conversations that emerge from the author's work. The first develops out of the connections that the author draws between systems of criminal justice and welfare. The second grows out of the disassociation he urges us to see between the logics and trajectories of crime, on the one hand, and criminal justice on the other. I then briefly describe how my own work has been influenced by and contributes to these two ongoing streams of research.

Keywords:

• Loïc Wacquant
• criminal justice
• welfare
• American government
• race and class
• political socialization

Notes

1. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health was a project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD, with cooperative funding from seventeen other agencies. No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy E. Lerman

AMY E. LERMAN is Assistant Professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.