Word: wacquant
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These institutions, according to sociologist Loic Wacquant, have each handled “the task of defining, confining, and controlling African Americans,” but the mass incarceration society we live in differs significantly from slavery and segregation. Their purpose was to extract cheap labor from blacks while still maintaining enough social distance between races for whites to benefit materially and psychologically. Globalization, however, wreaked havoc on this pre-1960s American social order as manufacturing jobs (and social mobility) moved to the suburbs and then overseas. Pushed into benefit-deprived, unstable service economy jobs, or into chronic...