The visibility of populations, policies, and the state matters greatly for questions of power, inequality, and democratic life. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining how visibility operates as a lever and effect of social control in a racially and economically stratified society. By doing so, the article identifies a paradox. Race- and class-empowered groups often pressure state actors to implement punitive policies or otherwise visibly contain and control disadvantaged populations. But they also tend to decry and disavow the necessary public costs of these disciplinary interventions. This creates a conundrum for authorities: how to satisfy popular demands for social control while concealing resource commitments. We use the term disciplinary tensions to describe the contradictory political desires that state actors must navigate to maintain legitimacy with privileged constituents. We examine two state projects that, in different ways, crystallize this dilemma: the expansion of low-income housing development in New York in the 1960s and 1970s and state prison construction in California in the 1980s and 1990s. In both episodes, officials responded to disciplinary tensions by turning to covert public finance options: specifically, revenue bonds, which seemingly detach policy from conventional tax-and-spend public finance. We argue that these cases shed light on the shifting nature of power as finance has come to pervade all aspects of government and covert governing tactics supplement and supplant society’s more direct practices of social control. Revenue bonds, in particular, allow governing actors to appease and placate the populace by reconfiguring the state’s disciplinary power so that social control appears to pay for itself.

中文翻译：

---

进行社会控制：贫困治理、公共财政和可见性政治

人口、政策和国家的可见性对于权力、不平等和民主生活问题至关重要。本文以现有学术为基础，研究了在种族和经济分层的社会中，可见性如何作为社会控制的杠杆和效果发挥作用。通过这样做，文章发现了一个悖论。种族和阶级赋权团体经常向国家行为者施压，要求其实施惩罚性政策或以其他方式明显遏制和控制弱势群体。但他们也倾向于谴责和否认这些纪律干预措施所必需的公共成本。这给当局带来了一个难题：如何在隐瞒资源承诺的同时满足民众对社会控制的要求。我们使用“纪律紧张”一词来描述国家行为者必须驾驭的相互矛盾的政治愿望，以维持特权选民的合法性。我们研究了两个以不同方式具体化这一困境的州项目：纽约 20 世纪 60 年代和 1970 年代的低收入住房开发扩张，以及加州 1980 年代和 1990 年代的州立监狱建设。在这两起事件中，官员们都通过转向隐蔽的公共财政选择来应对纪律紧张：特别是收益债券，它似乎将政策与传统的税收和支出公共财政分开。我们认为，这些案例揭示了权力性质的转变，因为金融已经渗透到政府的各个方面，秘密的治理策略补充并取代了社会更直接的社会控制实践。特别是收益债券，允许统治者通过重新配置国家的纪律权力来安抚和安抚民众，从而使社会控制看起来能够收回成本。