From the collapsing American dream of social mobility to the crumbling European promise of social stability, Punishing the Poor depicts the transatlantic development of the relationship between punishment and poverty under neoliberalism. The promises of the ‘era of leniency’, typified for Wacquant in the USA by both Civil Rights and the Great Society, are largely exhausted, replaced by ‘workfare’ schemes and the rise of ‘prisonfare’ that has seen an almost 500 per cent increase in US prison populations since 1980. Much of Europe, in Wacquant's estimation, may not be far behind.

Wacquant begins his book by detailing the US historical shift from welfare to ‘workfare’, which he defines as the rise of a ‘new punitive organization of welfare programs’, oriented less towards providing opportunities for the poor than in pushing recipients ‘into the subpoverty jobs that have proliferated after the discarding of the Fordist‐Keynesian compromise’ (p. 43). Culminating in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, for Wacquant workfare is the primary means through which women, particularly minority women, are taught their place in the new economy. Disciplined for their dependency (itself a product of this era of leniency) through the proffering of part‐time and poverty wage labour in lieu of welfare benefits, workfare becomes less a means of social mobility than a means of social control for poor women and children.