Prisons of Poverty

Description

In the early 1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani launched a zero-tolerance campaign aimed at street disorders and petty offenders, incarnated in the infamous "squeegee man." New York City soon became a planetary showcase for an aggressive approach to law enforcement that, despite its extravagant costs and the absence of connection to the crime drop, came to be admired and imitated by other cities in the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America.

Loic Wacquant is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and researcher at the Centre de sociologie europeenne, Paris.