Michel Foucault's presence is today pervasive in the field of the sociology of punishment. More than a founding father and the author of Discipline and Punish, it is his analysis on governmentality that has been decisively contributing to the renewal of the studies of punitive practices. This seems to be related to the increasing adoption of the analytics of government's framework of study in which the emphasis tends to migrate from the diachronically oriented research on the transition of power technologies to the synchronically oriented research on the mixed forms they can assume. Based on the presentation of four well-known theses on the contemporary punitive turn, I intend to indicate both their strengths and fragilities by the specific manner each of them addresses certain concerns of the Foucauldian analytics of government. Specially, I argue that there seems to be a blind spot in these perspectives, i.e., the absence of the Foucauldian concept of neoliberalism as an art of government which aims to diffuse the corporate form throughout the whole social field and the way an entrepreneurial rationality is increasingly connecting the management of the cities, the govern of conducts and the control of crime.
Foucault; Analytics of Government; Punitive Turn; Neoliberalism; City