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Résumé La justice constitutionnelle est consubstantielle au constitutionnalisme dont la finalité est d'encadrer le pouvoir des gouvernants et de protéger la liberté des gouvernés. Cette mission est pleinement assurée au Bénin par le juge constitutionnel dans la mesure où la Constitution lui en donne compétence, mais surtout parce que tout citoyen a le droit de la saisir soit directement soit par voie de l'exception d'inconstitutionnalité de toute loi, acte administratif, décision de justice, comportements attentatoires aux droits fondamentaux.

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States & other advanced societies over the past quarter-century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare & justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive "workfare" & expansive "prisonfare" are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; & that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu's concept of "bureaucratic field" to revise Piven & Cloward's classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, & contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault's vision of the "disciplinary society," David Garland's account of the "culture of control," & David Harvey's characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state & the cultural trope of "individual responsibility." This suggests that we must theorize the prison, not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective & aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship. Adapted from the source document.