There are several interconnected issues raised by Loïc Wacquant's work which reflect not only general sociological and criminological concerns, but also pertain to specific areas of debate, including the function of imprisonment, the notion of illicit markets, the interpretation of violence, the concept of collective action and the new ways of superseding neoliberal philosophies.

In an analysis of the continuity between the prison and the ghetto, Wacquant (2001) argues that both host a surplus population, the human waste discarded by the productive system and ignored by the welfare state. The growth of these two receptacles of marginality, he remarks, is not a response to growing crime, but to growing poverty; not a reaction to criminal insecurity, but to social insecurity: in brief, the war against poverty has turned into war against the poor. An expansion of this analysis is found in the more recent Punishing the poor (Wacquant, 2009), where Wacquant discusses how the current workfare philosophies are intertwined with the retrenchment of inclusive assistance and policies, and the expansion of custodial punishment. The control of the economically disadvantaged is thus described as a result of fear and resentment on the part of the better-off, a reassertion of institutional strength, an outmoded exhibition of the moralising role of the state. Warehouses for the dispossessed, prisons testify to a politics of ‘class cleansing’ implemented against undesirable populations and neighbourhoods whose very existence may be disturbing, hence the urge to make them coercively disappear. What makes the prison system different today, according to Wacquant, is that ‘it does not carry out a positive economic mission of recruitment and disciplining an active workforce. The prison serves mainly to warehouse the precarious and deproletarianized fractions of the black working class in the dualizing city’ (Wacquant, 2009, p 208). Is, then, the growth of custodial penalties a mere reflection of the decline of the welfare state and the criminalisation of marginality?

We have two distinct issues here, the former relating to the punishment of social insecurity rather than criminal insecurity, the latter pertaining to the manifest or latent function of punishment itself. What follows may add to Wacquant's analysis while suggesting a slight change in the focus of theoretical inquiry.