Considered as part of a grander economic architecture, however, it makes an awful kind of sense. As Wacquant continues, welfare reform “confirmed and accelerated the gradual replacement of a protective (semi) welfare state by a disciplinary state mating the stinging goad of workfare with the dull hammer of prisonfare, for which the close monitoring and the punitive containment of derelict categories stand in for social policy toward the dispossessed.”15 Toil hopelessly or go to prison: that is life at the bottom, thanks to Bill Clinton.
