Poverty Control and the Penal System

Abstract

To reflect on the criminalization and penalization of poverty, this article analyzes the neoconservative turn in criminal policy, as an expression of recent changes under contemporary capitalism. In a context characterized by a regression in social policies, the paper discusses the expansion of the penal system as a strategy used by capitalist States to contain and administer in a criminalizing form the growing and increasingly complex manifestations of the “social question” linked to an objective situation of massive and structural unemployment. To conclude the debate, it presents some elements to reflect on the historic function of bourgeois penal law and to analyze its fundamental role in current imperialist strategy.