I González Sánchez, Neoliberalismo y castigo

Leading scholars have called for an expansion of the punishment and society perspective beyond the North Atlantic, neoliberal heartlands on which this body of literature has primarily focused its analytical gaze (Simon and Sparks, 2013). Ignacio González’s Neoliberalismo y castigo (Neoliberalism and Punishment, hereinafter NyC) is a decisive step in that direction. Indeed, not many monographs published in Spanish are as consistent as NyC in exploring the penal field as a complex social institution (see NyC, pp. 25, 177), recognising that the penal field cannot be understood by merely taking into account its legal and law enforcement dimensions (pp. 52, 184). Superficially considered, NyC can be seen as an academic effort to test the neoliberal penality thesis (Wacquant, 1999/2009, 2009) in a Southern European jurisdiction such as Spain. Certainly, the book presents the results of that type of exploration, but it goes well beyond that specific academic endeavour. It makes a significant contribution to the political economy of punishment by closely scrutinising the impact of the neoliberal ethos and rationales on three key public policy fields: labour policies, social policies, and penal policies. For these purposes, NyC examines the shifts in these three fields witnessed in Spain over a four-decade period by considering them through the lens of some basic tropes of neoliberal governmentality, that is those of individualisation, ‘contractualization’ and moralisation, all of which are safeguarded by punitive forms of state coercion (see e.g. pp. 179, 181–182). In elaborating its richly textured analysis of these public policy changes, NyC goes a long way in revitalising and updating academic debates on the neoliberal penality thesis. The monograph persuasively highlights the many methodological and theoretical strengths of that analytical framework (see pp. 37–41). However, in problematising Wacquant’s thesis by bringing it to a new geographical and temporal setting, NyC lays bare some of its limitations requiring further examination (see also Wacquant’s Foreword, p. 12). In fact, the book casts new light on two critical dimensions of that thesis. Initially, it challenges the claim that an expanding penal state may be seen as a vital, inherent component of neoliberalism (pp. 44–45, 187–189), in line with previous critics of Wacquant’s work (Mayer, 2010; O’Malley, 2014). In fact, the book ends by emphasising that the consolidation of a neoliberal rationale in the field of public policies ‘does not necessarily entail the expansion of the penal arm of the state’ (NyC, p. 204). That perspective allows González to advocate the validity of the neoliberal penality Punishment & Society 2023, Vol. 25(4) 1138–1167 © The Author(s) 2022