Governing through the looking-glass. neoliberalism, managerialism and psychopolitics of crime control.

The aim of this article is to make both an epistemological and a substantive contribution to the study of punitiveness. Epistemologically, an argument is developed for the utilisation of psychoanalysis and especially Erich Fromm’s ‘materialistic’ strand. Substantively, and by way of bringing Frommian psychoanalysis to bear upon insights produced by political economies of contemporary punishment, the goal is to trace the ways in which penality contributes to the broader project of state domination over the public in the US and the UK under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. The focus is particularly on the symbolic role of physical penal control over the weakest cohorts in eliciting middle-class support behind states failing public expectations on the socioeconomic front. This process, it is argued further, is made possible through the political construction and deployment of violent street crime as a serious and spreading danger, but also by reference to what have been typically theorised as the morally neutral and dispassionate idioms and operations of managerialism.