How Effective is Prison? Is there a better way?

Few institutions provoke as much disagreement as the modern penal state. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant, libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard, and economist Gary Becker each examined punishment from entirely different starting points — critical sociology, natural-rights philosophy, and neoclassical economics, respectively — yet their conclusions intersect in surprising ways, and diverge sharply in others. This article compares Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor (2009), Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty (1982), and Becker’s landmark 1968 paper “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” to trace where these three visions of justice converge, and where they fundamentally part ways.

Wacquant: The Penal State as Manager of Marginality

In Punishing the Poor, Wacquant argues that punishment in advanced capitalist societies, especially the United States, has been repurposed as a tool of social and economic governance rather than a response to crime per se. His central claim is that the retrenchment of the welfare state under neoliberalism did not shrink government — it transformed it. As economic deregulation destabilized low-wage labor markets and dismantled social safety nets, the state compensated by expanding its penal apparatus: aggressive policing, mass incarceration, and intensified surveillance of poor and racialized urban populations.

Wacquant describes this as a shift from “welfare” to “workfare” and “prisonfare” — a double regulation of poverty in which punitive social policy (forcing the poor into precarious labor) is paired with punitive penal policy (criminalizing the behaviors and spaces associated with poverty). For Wacquant, prisons and police do not primarily target dangerous individuals; they manage populations rendered economically superfluous by market restructuring. The penal state, in his account, is not receding but is instead a “Centaur state” — liberal and permissive toward capital and the affluent, disciplinary and punitive toward the poor. Punishment, in this framework, is fundamentally about class control and the management of social insecurity, not about individualized justice or crime reduction.

Rothbard: The State as Coercive Monopoly, Justice as Restitution

Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty approaches punishment from an entirely different angle: not sociological description, but natural-rights philosophy. Rothbard defines the state as an institution that claims a compulsory monopoly on the use of force within a given territory, extracting resources from the population through taxation, which he characterizes as inherently coercive rather than consensual. Because the state’s authority rests on coercion rather than voluntary agreement, Rothbard argues it lacks the moral legitimacy typically ascribed to it, including the legitimacy to punish on behalf of “society.”

From this premise, Rothbard builds a theory of justice centered on the victim rather than the state. He rejects both retributive theories (punishment as deserved suffering) and utilitarian deterrence theories (punishment as a tool for social order) as insufficient or incoherent justifications for state violence. Instead, Rothbard proposes a restitution-based model: a criminal has violated the rights of a specific victim, and justice consists of compelling the offender to compensate that victim — ideally restoring them, as far as possible, to the position they occupied before the crime. He extends this into a “proportionality” principle, allowing punishment up to the point of forcing the criminal to suffer a comparable loss, but the emphasis throughout is on victim restitution rather than abstract social debt paid to the state. Imprisonment, in Rothbard’s framework, is often deeply inefficient and unjust: it costs taxpayers money, produces no compensation for victims, and empowers the state rather than repairing the harm done to the individual who was wronged.

Becker: Restitution as Economically Efficient

Writing over a decade earlier from a very different disciplinary tradition, Gary Becker’s “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” models criminal behavior using the tools of neoclassical economics, treating offenders as rational actors who weigh the expected costs and benefits of crime. Becker’s paper is best known for framing law enforcement as a resource-allocation problem: society should invest in deterrence up to the point where the marginal cost of additional enforcement equals the marginal benefit in reduced crime and harm.

Where Becker’s analysis intersects with Rothbard’s is in his comparison of punishment types. Becker distinguishes between punishments that are pure “social costs” — most notably imprisonment, which consumes real resources (guard salaries, facility costs, the offender’s lost productivity) without generating any offsetting benefit — and punishments structured as transfers, such as fines or restitution payments, which move resources from offender to victim or state without destroying wealth in the process. Because transfers avoid the deadweight loss associated with incarceration, Becker concludes that a rational, efficiency-minded society should rely on fines and restitution wherever feasible, reserving costly imprisonment for cases where offenders cannot pay (for example, because they lack sufficient assets). This is a purely economic, efficiency-based argument — Becker is not working from natural-rights premises at all — yet it arrives at a policy conclusion that closely parallels Rothbard’s: restitution is generally preferable to state-administered imprisonment.

Points of Convergence

The most striking overlap in this comparison is between Rothbard and Becker. Despite starting from incompatible philosophical foundations — Rothbard from deontological natural rights, Becker from consequentialist cost-benefit analysis — both converge on restitution as superior to imprisonment. Rothbard argues this on moral grounds: restitution respects the victim’s rights and avoids extending the state’s coercive reach. Becker arrives at a similar policy preference on efficiency grounds: restitution avoids wasting real resources that imprisonment destroys. Their agreement suggests that the case for restitution-based justice does not depend on any single ethical or ideological commitment — it can be reached independently through ethics or through economics.

Points of Divergence

Wacquant’s framework sits apart from, and in some ways in tension with, both Rothbard and Becker. Where Rothbard treats the state’s coercive capacity as the central problem to be dismantled or minimized, Wacquant is concerned less with the abstract legitimacy of state coercion and more with who it is deployed against and why. Wacquant would likely argue that a purely restitution-based or minimal-state model does not resolve the dynamics he identifies — it may even intensify them, since he sees punitive expansion as a direct response to the social dislocation produced by market deregulation and welfare retrenchment, both of which are policies libertarian frameworks tend to favor. In Wacquant’s account, shrinking the state’s welfare functions without addressing resulting economic marginality tends to produce more aggressive policing and incarceration of the poor, not less — the “invisible hand” of the market paired with the “iron fist” of the penal state.

Becker’s economic model, meanwhile, is agnostic about these structural questions. It treats crime as a matter of individual rational choice and optimal resource allocation, largely bracketing the question of why certain populations commit more crime or attract more enforcement attention in the first place — a silence Wacquant’s sociological account is specifically designed to fill.

Conclusion

Read together, these three works illuminate different facets of the same institution. Wacquant diagnoses the penal state as an instrument of class and racial management born of neoliberal economic restructuring. Rothbard indicts the state’s coercive monopoly itself and proposes restitution as a morally grounded alternative. Becker, working independently from economic first principles, arrives at a strikingly similar preference for restitution over imprisonment — but for reasons of efficiency rather than rights. The comparison suggests that critiques of mass incarceration can emerge from remarkably different intellectual traditions, even as those traditions disagree sharply about what, if anything, should replace the current system, and about whether the state’s retreat from social provision helps or worsens the problem in the first place.

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Wayne Creed

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