The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare by François Bonnet (review)

The Upper Limit offers a new perspective on an old problem. Namely, how to account for the "amazing variation in how different countries arrange welfare and punishment." (1) Or, to borrow an example from this book, why there are violent riots in Brazilian prisons and saunas in their Finnish equivalents. Some scholars have sought to account for this kind of variation by exploring the events, decisions, and actors thought to be responsible for such exceptional outcomes. And others have pointed to broad social, political, and cultural shifts in late-modern societies that predispose nations towards penal and social policy convergence. Against these two assumptions, François Bonnet offers a structural explanation of how and why punishment and welfare vary across nations and over time.

In particular, this book develops a theory of punishment and welfare that is grounded in the Victorian concept of less eligibility wherein "the living standards of the lowest class of workers determine the maximum generosity of the welfare state, and punishment is to make a life of crime less attractive than a life of collecting welfare benefits, if they exist." (119) The conditions of the lowest paid working class, then, structurally determine the upper limit of welfare's generosity and punishment's humanity. So, in countries like Finland where minimum wages are quite high there is room for a more generous approach to welfare and a humane approach to punishment. Whereas in places like Brazil, where the poorest survive through the informal economy and are under constant threat of violence, the upper limit is too low to allow for anything but sparse relief and harsh punishment. That said, the theory of less eligibility says nothing of where the upper limit should be, but rather seeks to illustrate the structural coherence between the living conditions of the lowest paid workers and a given country's mix of social and penal policies.

Irrespective of the particulars of time, place, and context, all societies are suggested to be ordered by the principles of less eligibility because they must all grapple with "what to do about poverty and crime and how to balance compassion for the poor with the interests of capitalists." (26) Positioned in this way, this book indeed offers "a theory of unusual range." (4) To put this theory to the test, Bonnet seeks to explain the United States' peculiar mix of punishment and welfare since the 1960s and, in particular, the rise of mass incarceration that has long captured the attention of criminologists and sociologists alike. Mobilizing equal parts historical interpretation and ethnographic observation, this book balances a sweeping analysis of postwar American history with what these transformations have meant for ordinary people in one neighbourhood in Brooklyn, nyc.

Bonnet's argument unfolds as follows. The first chapter does the big picture conceptual work of explaining less eligibility by tracing its logic through medieval Europe, the English Poor Laws, the creation of modern welfare states, and their cousin "workfare." The second chapter turns to the United States' particular mix of punishment and welfare since the 1960s, explaining mass incarceration and welfare reform as punitive adjustments to the declining situation of low wage workers. The latter half of the book draws out the implications of these changes in one urban, poor, and predominantly African American neighborhood in NYC where the author conducted field research. Chapter three introduces readers to the field site of East New York. Here, Bonnet positions neighborhood change, and in particular the role of declining crime rates beginning in the 1990s, as a "window of observation" (46) into the wider structural transformations described in the second chapter. Across the final chapters, Bonnet explores the local consequences of America's punitive adjustment as manifestations of less eligibility. He challenges readers to see the structural commonalities between police violence against African Americans, exclusionary public housing policies, nonprofit delivery of social services, and poor shelter conditions by illuminating their shared relationship to less...