This paper argues that there is a new neoliberal penality emerging in the United States that exhibits four primary characteristics: (1) the death of rehabilitation, (2) the de-individualization of the criminal, (3) the emergence of a market for deviance, and (4) the managerialistic approach. The prison-industrial complex in the United States illustrates these characteristics, but the characteristics are not limited to the prison-industrial complex.

The paper draws on Foucault's concept of the prison as an institution primarily of individual normalization, but notes that it presupposes rehabilitation as the primary goal of the institution. Using Foucault's work in Discipline and Punish as a starting point, the paper demonstrates that the "penal culture" has shifted from one that views crime and imprisonment as a resolvable social deviance to one that views crime and imprisonment as inevitable—a natural (if unfortunate) byproduct of modern (and especially urban) societies. The law (not the discourse around it) views deviation as a result of nature and volition to the exclusion of social explanations. As such, the service of imprisonment is less distinguishable from other government services, and contracting the service of imprisonment seems as morally justifiable as contracting services like building roads or collecting garbage. In the American neoliberal world of rational economic actors, deviance is a cost-benefit decision like any other. As such, normalization through punishment focuses not on the (internal) subjugation of the individual, but the (external) control of the array of choices (there are four sets of sentencing laws in the U.S. that back this claim). Moreover, the prisoner's body is no longer an instrument through which the soul may be reached as Foucault concluded, but rather, it is both an object upon which to perform carceral services and an instrument through which profit may be extracted. This paper presents the case that the prison-industrial complex in the United States is a continuation of the technologies of governmentality Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, but prison privatization embodies a new stage upheld by the four pillars of the emerging neoliberal penalty.