In May 2020, George Floyd was killed by a knee on his neck. Overnight, the slogan "Defund the Police" burst from a radical fringe into the mainstream discourse. Donations poured in, banners went up on walls, and academic conferences were scheduled two years out. A position that had until then been marginal — not merely to cut police funding but ultimately to abolish police and prisons — suddenly acquired an unprecedented moral legitimacy.
Then the Black community leaders and residents of Minneapolis — the city where Floyd died, the epicenter of the movement — came out against "defunding the police."
Out-of-town activists were dismayed. They did not understand, or would not understand, that the communities most harmed by over-policing are also the communities most harmed by crime. These two "most deeps" overlap in the very same population, and what that population wants is not the absence of police but neither to be beaten to death by the police nor to be beaten to death by the drug dealers.
In NLR issue 158, Loïc Wacquant has written a rather unwelcome piece. He has not come to defend the police — he is the author of Punishing the Poor, one of the sharpest critics of the penal state. He has come to give the left's abolitionism a check-up. The diagnosis is not good: philosophically seductive, logically inconsistent, sociologically untenable, and politically a dead end.
Simultaneously Over-Governed and Abandoned
The core argument of abolitionism rests on a factual premise: the American penal system is a machine of oppression that disproportionately grinds down Black people and the poor. This premise is entirely sound. Wacquant himself has spent twenty years arguing it.
But abolitionism leaps from this premise to an unexamined conclusion: therefore, the penal state itself should be abolished. Wacquant says that this leaves out the entire second half of the story.
What marginalized communities suffer is not a single "over-punishment" but a double bind: they simultaneously endure over-policing — as targets of surveillance and force — and under-policing — the absence of prevention and protection. The police arrive to make arrests, not to protect. The courts arrive to convict, not to dispense justice. Meanwhile, street violence, domestic violence, and property crime run rampant through these communities, and the victims receive no effective institutional response.
Who are the greatest victims? Poor Black women. In the urban "hyperghetto" they bear the most harm from both ends at once — exposed to police violence on one side and street violence on the other, with no protection from either.
This is not Wacquant's invention. It is the core demand of a century of the Black civil rights movement: not the absence of legal protection, but equal legal protection. Under Jim Crow, one of the pillars of racial terror was the exclusion of Black people from the judicial system — rendering them unable to resort to the courts to protect their minimum bodily integrity and public safety. The ghetto uprisings of the 1960s were ignited precisely by police surveillance and violence. But what the uprisings demanded was better policing, not no policing.
Trevor Gardner puts it precisely: abolitionism disregards the "security interests" of citizens, above all "the primary interests of African Americans in the administration of penality." This interest is twofold: the interest in safety from private violence, and the interest in democratic influence over penal institutions. Abolitionism has taken the second interest (opposition to police violence) for the whole, and forgotten the first (protection from private violence).
"Community" Is a Romanticized Word
The abolitionist alternative points, almost without exception, to a single word: "community." Transfer power from professionals to the community, center community knowledge, listen to the community's voice.
Wacquant's rejoinder is razor-sharp: Who in the community has a voice?
The shopkeeper or the shoplifter? The landlord or the homeless person? The mother of three or the corner drug dealer who terrorizes them? The teacher or the truant youth? The police officer who lives in the community or the gang member who controls the street?
The "community" is not a harmonious, self-governing, naturally just unit. It is stratified, conflict-ridden, shot through with asymmetries of power. To hand the power of punishment to "the community" means, in practice, what? It means that those with the most power — those with resources, organization, and the means of violence — get to define what counts as justice. This is not liberation; it is the legitimation of lynching.
History is not on abolitionism's side either. James Forman's Locking Up Our Own records a forgotten history: in the two decades after the civil rights movement receded, the Black middle class strongly supported "getting tough on crime." They regarded the Black drug dealers and street criminals who spread chaos as "race traitors" and "internal enemies" — not oppressed victims in need of sympathy, but concrete threats to their own safety. The concept of "Black-on-Black crime" was not invented by white racists; it appeared on the cover of the August 1979 issue of Ebony magazine. Black middle-class commentators denounced drug dealers as a "scourge on the earth" who "deserved to be roasted and fried," and even compared them to the Ku Klux Klan.
This is not to say the Black middle class was "wrong." It is to say that when you treat "the community" as a unified subject naturally inclined toward justice, you overlook a basic fact: the community is internally stratified by class, riven by conflicts of interest, and its attitude toward crime depends on whether you stand at the receiving end or the inflicting end.
More ironic still is the problem of logical consistency: if penal authority is to be handed to the community, then why shouldn't affluent white communities and suburban communities be free to shape the penal state according to their own needs? In a democracy, it is difficult to maintain that "only marginalized communities have the right to define justice." And once the gates are opened, bourgeois whites typically dominate county and state politics — and abolitionism would meet the very outcome it least desires: a penal system defined by the tyranny of the majority.
The Prison-Industrial Complex: A Convenient Target
One of abolitionism's most popular narratives is the "Prison-Industrial Complex" (PIC): prisons are a profit-driven industry, and capitalists stuff people behind bars to make money. The appeal of this narrative is its simplicity — there is a clear villain (the private prison companies), a clear motive (profit), and a direct remedy (cut the profit chain).
Wacquant says: nearly every link in it is wrong.
To draw an analogy between the PIC and the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) is a fundamental error. The MIC is genuinely profit-driven — defense contractors dominate research, development, and production, spend billions on lobbying, and employ millions. But prisons? Private prisons in the United States house only about 8 percent of all inmates. Private security firms employ roughly 40,000, while the public system has about 500,000 employees. The total inmate population is about 2 million, but the overwhelming majority are held in public facilities.
The prison is not a profit center; it is a public policy choice. Its expansion is not the result of capital chasing profit but of political decisions — "law and order" populism, the war on drugs, the tightening of sentencing laws. The trouble with the PIC narrative is not only that it is factually inaccurate but that it obscures the political nature of the penal leviathan. When you suppose that prisons are the business of capitalists, you aim your fire at the private prison companies; yet private prisons account for only 8 percent, and what truly runs is a public bureaucracy driven by political logic, not the logic of profit. You have hit the wrong target.
The Fiction of the Genealogy
The critique that demands the most courage is Wacquant's handling of the narrative that "the prison is the continuation of slavery." Advanced by Angela Davis, Dorothy Roberts, and others, this narrative is close to a creed within the abolitionist movement: today's regime of incarceration can be traced back to slavery and the racial capitalism it underpinned.
Wacquant responds with three historical facts, each cool and precise.
First, the prison was not the functional successor to slavery. After the Civil War, the incarceration rate of Black people was lowest in the cotton-plantation counties where slavery had previously predominated — because the planters, acting out of economic interest, strove to keep the formerly enslaved outside penal supervision so they would remain in the fields working. (Source: Chris Muller, Science, 2021.)
Second, the development of the American prison originated in the Jacksonian era of the North (after the 1820s), not in the slaveholding tradition of the South. Authorities deployed carceral institutions to manage the problem populations thrown up by accelerated social change — urbanization, slums, street crime, ethnic conflict, class conflict. The Jacksonian package of innovations included "the penitentiary for the criminal, the asylum for the mad, the almshouse for the poor, the orphan asylum for homeless children, the reformatory for the juvenile." Among the precursors to the American prison, there is no obvious or latent connection to slavery.
Third, convict leasing does indeed evoke plantation labor, but it was first deployed in the Northern states after the 1820s, long before abolition. Its central motor was class and labor exploitation, not race.
This is not to say that race does not matter — race profoundly shapes the operation of American penality (who gets arrested, how harshly they are sentenced, where they are confined). But Wacquant's point is that to trace the origin of the prison to a linear continuation of slavery distorts the historical record three times over. Class and labor exploitation are central to the formation of American penality; race is the manner of its distribution. To confuse the two is to send your critique off course.
One to One Thousand One Hundred Sixty-Seven
Then there is the political reality. Here Wacquant produces a comparison of figures that leaves one breathless:
| Indicator | Norway, 1971 | United States, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Population | 4 million (mostly rural and small-town) | 342 million (80% urban) |
| Racial composition | Homogeneous | Deeply divided along ethnic lines |
| Incarceration rate per 100,000 | 44 | 580 |
| Total inmates | 1,700 | Nearly 2 million |
The raw ratio: 1 : 1167.
In 1971, Norway's Thomas Mathiesen wrote the abolitionist classic The Politics of Abolition, arguing for the gradual erosion of the penal institution's legitimacy through "negative reforms." In the Norway of 1971 — 4 million people, racially homogeneous, 1,700 inmates — this was an imaginable strategy. In the America of 2025 — 342 million people, racially torn, 2 million inmates — to do the same thing is a challenge of an altogether different order of magnitude.
To promote "negative reforms" aimed at undermining the legitimacy of penal institutions in Norway in 1971 is one thing; to do the same in the United States in 2025 is quite another.
This is not to say "because it is hard, do not do it." It is to say that when your political strategy rests on a scale gap of 1:1167, you need a path more concrete than "reimagining."
Waiting for Godot
This brings us to the sixth and most lethal critique: with what does abolitionism propose to replace the penal state?
After decades of incubation, the answer remains unclear. Wacquant examines the alternatives one by one:
Restorative justice — it touches less than 2 percent of case volume. Most offenders do not care about their victims. Most victims do not wish to come face to face with their offenders. It shames the offender's self, turns the victim into a prop for a ritual, and is structurally disadvantageous to the weak.
Indigenous methods (Yukon, Hollow Water) — inapplicable to a modern society of high population density, complex division of labor, deep individualism, and moral diversity. Ironically, these indigenous groups themselves suffer deeply from crime and incarceration in every former British colony.
"Call your neighbors" — Critical Resistance (the organization founded by Davis) recommends that instead of calling the police one should "call someone else — a neighbor, family, or friends." Confronted with an ongoing knife-point robbery or a domestic violence incident, this is a practical and legal absurdity.
Erik Olin Wright once set a standard: emancipatory social science must develop "an account of viable alternatives" as a response to the critique of existing institutions. Wacquant's verdict is that this account is conspicuously absent from the abolitionist manual.
Abolitionists spend a great deal of energy trying to distinguish themselves from "reformers." But when pressed for actionable strategies, what they cite is "richer investment in social services," "enhancing community resources," "investing in people and communities" — in other words, the standard practices of reformers devoted to strengthening the social state. The rhetoric is abolitionist; the practice is minimalist.
That sentence is the sharpest cut in the entire piece. Abolitionist rhetoric promises to dismantle the penal state; its practice retreats into social-democratic reform. This is not revolution; this is a change of packaging.
Radical Penal Minimalism: A Genuinely Radical Program
If abolitionism will not do, then what? Wacquant's answer is not to maintain the status quo — his critique of the American penal state is as fierce as any abolitionist's. His answer is Radical Penal Minimalism.
The theoretical foundation comes from Durkheim: crime and punishment are normal and necessary facts of social life. Even in the simplest social formations, the collective affirmation of norms mechanically produces deviants. Punishment is not "pathology"; it is a structural-functional requirement of large, differentiated societies. The question is not whether to punish but how to punish, whom to punish, and how harshly.
Wherein lies the difference from abolitionism? Abolitionism would tear down the penal state. Minimalism says: the penal state is necessary, but it is now too large, too harsh, too skewed. What must be done is to drastically reduce its scope while increasing its quality.
Ten principles — the first five govern the basics: acknowledge the necessity of the penal state; drastically narrow the range of criminalized conduct (not everything should be a crime); punishment as a last resort (exhaust all alternatives — social, economic, educational, housing, medical — first); imprisonment reduced to a minimum (confine only those who are genuinely dangerous); abolish the dogmatic opposition between "state sanction" and "alternatives."
The latter five govern the sociological deepening: the penal system is inherently oriented toward urban marginal populations, and this built-in selectivity must be resisted; acknowledge the class bifurcation of punishment — the bourgeoisie enjoy a dignified "paper penality," the racialized lower strata suffer a degrading "flesh penality"; recognize that punishment is itself a harm, that it manufactures stigma and destroys social bonds; at every stage, weigh individual responsibility against social adversity simultaneously; and treat criminal justice as a core public service and fund it adequately.
There is a counter-intuitive paradox here — Wacquant calls it a "scissor movement": to reduce the population processed through the penal chain, you actually need to increase the budget and the personnel. More public defenders (triple the number), more judges (to lower the caseload per case), more probation officers (shifted from surveillance to support), even more prison guards (to raise the dignity of both inmates and guards). Abolitionists mistake the absolute size of the penal state for the cause of penal excess, but the real problem lies not in size but in scope. What you must do is expand while narrowing: more hands, fewer arrests.
The Ethics of Conviction and the Ethics of Responsibility
The essay closes on Weber. Wacquant uses the Weberian distinction to draw the entire argument together: abolitionism is an ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) — loyal to an absolute ideal, regardless of consequences, indifferent to feasibility. Radical penal minimalism is an ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) — it considers feasible paths, assumes the consequences, and within the limits of the possible strives for a piece of utopia.
We are entitled to a piece of utopia within the limits of the possible. — Bourdieu
This is not compromise. It is another kind of radicalism — a radicalism that does not indulge in moral self-gratification, that is willing to wade into the muddy reality and genuinely reduce harm. Abolitionism lets you stand on a clean position, but that position is very far from any real community. Minimalism gets your hands dirty, but it has a chance of turning America's 2 million inmates into 360,000 — the intermediate goal Wacquant envisions. The distance between 360,000 and 2 million is 1.64 million real people. What they need is not your "reimagining," but your program.