François Bonnet - The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare

Since 1993, crime in the United States has fallen to historic lows. This has provided extraordinary legitimacy to the peculiar mix of welfare and punishment that the country enforces, with ever stingier social programs for the poor and the highest rates of incarceration in the world. This book sets out to explain this peculiar mix.

There is amazing variation in how different countries arrange welfare and punishment. The Western European safety net is vastly more generous than the American one, which is still far superior to Brazils. Punishment is equally diverse. In the United States, police officers kill about 900 civilians in the streets per year; police in Japan, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom put together barely kill thirty. In Finland, prisoners can go to the sauna.

The Upper Limit proposes a new theory of welfare and punishment that explains why such variations exist. This theory is an original reformulation of the Victorian principle of less eligibility: every society has to make welfare less attractive than minimum-wage work and arrange punishment so that crime is less attractive than welfare.

The Upper Limit puts this theory to work to explain the rise of mass incarceration and the transformations of the welfare state in the United States. Doing so, it contributes

This books starting point is a triple observation: penal convergence didnt happen, sequential histories of policy decisions are not explanations, and racism doesnt explain why the United States incarcerates its whites at a rate probably ten times greater than Western Europeans incarcerate their own whites. A quick glance at history makes it unclear that Western European countries (or Japan) are any less racist than the United States. Against both the exceptionalism and the convergence theses, The Upper Limit provides a structural explanation for patterns of punishment and welfare in time and space. All societies have to deal with their poor, and where the poor are comparatively better off, welfare is more generous and punishment more lenient. Because the United States is a more unequal society, where low-wage workers struggle to a degree unknown in most Western European countries, social policy is less generous and penal policy less humane.

The Upper Limit proposes a new interpretation of postwar American history based on a close tracking of low-wage living standards. In short, rising living standards during postwar affluence made for the policy breakthroughs of the 1960s (the Great Society), and declining living standards since the 1970s have lowered the upper limit, forcing all-too-happy policy makers to enforce a punitive adjustment. This adjustment started in the 1970s, in the context of rising crime rates and widening fears among conservatives about the collapse of social order. Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, homicide rates doubled in the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, crime became a central concern in American life. Punishment became more severe. The rate of incarceration increased sharply in the 1980s, to become the highest in the world. Meanwhile, states and federal government reforms radically down-graded social policy in an effort that culminated with the 1996 welfare reform, which was explicitly designed to get the poor out of welfare and into labor markets.

At the same time, in the 1990s, crime fell in the United States in historic proportions. Homicides dropped by almost half between 1990 and 2010. Violent and property crime, as registered by victimization surveys, dropped in similar proportions. The crime drop steered criticism away from mass incarceration and normalized the welfare reform, by implying that a weakened safety net was compatible with restored public order.

In short, over the past thirty years, American policy makers have made welfare less generous and punishment harsher. Such a trend seems like a recipe for disaster, or so twentieth-century social scientists might think. Yet American society has not collapsed, to the chagrin of progressives around the world. In fact, while many see the American mix of welfare and punishment as aberrant, irrational, and unsustainable, it is hailed by American conservatives as a historic policy success. In their view, crime, riots, and general mess were born out of the optimistic policies of the 1960s (the Great Society, the War on Poverty). Mass incarceration and welfare reform have (seemingly) restored order. Crime is now at historical lows; urban nuisances such as panhandlers and homeless people are pushed out of the way of the well-to-do; cities have become transformed for consumerist enjoyment. No expensive social redistribution was needed, just a strong police force and courts willing to enforce the full extent of the law. In American and international policy circles, the crime drop in the United States has strengthened the idea that punitive law enforcement and restrictive access to poor relief is a perfectly adequate way to handle the nuisances of poverty.

A key assumption of this book is the importance of crimes role in shaping societies. When bodies start piling up in the streets, the daily lives of people across social groups are completely transformed. People suddenly need to take costly precautions that dramatically diminish their quality of life. I believe social scientists need to take seriously variations in crime rates and other social problems as clues to assess the workings of a given mix of welfare and punishment.