Loic Wacquant

Loic Wacquant is a French sociologist, born in Nimes in 1960, and a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his theory of a deadly symbiosis linking the ghetto and the prison as interconnected institutions of racial control, arguing in books including Urban Outcasts (2008) and Punishing the Poor (2009) that mass incarceration constitutes the first genuine prison society in history and a fourth peculiar institution enforcing America's color line, following slavery, Jim Crow and the mid-century urban ghetto. In Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004) he drew on his own training at a Chicago boxing gym to develop a body-centered, participant-observation approach to urban ethnography. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.