8 - Penal comparisons: puzzling relations

Summary

In retrospect, it seems surprising that it had attracted so little attention before. It is hardly news – it was hardly news when Durkheim considered the matter at the end of the nineteenth century – that punishment and ideas about punishment vary between different societies, and that these variations can be related to larger social and political differences. Several theorists had postulated or investigated a possible connection (some kind of inverse relationship) between a society's welfare provision and the severity of its punishments (see for example Greenberg1999; Downes and Hansen 2006; Beckett and Western 2001). Certainly, some had spotted a link between the advance of neoliberalism in the United States and the spectacular rise in US punishment levels from the early 1970s onwards (e.g. Downes 2001). And some had made use or mention of Esping-Andersen's (1990) typology of modern capitalist welfare states in the penal context (Kilcommins et al. 2004: Chapter 7; Beckett and Western 2001). But we flatter ourselves that our 2006 work Penal Systems: A Comparative Approach (Cavadino and Dignan 2006) demonstrated just how illuminating was the Esping-Andersen schema when applied to comparative penology.

To recapitulate briefly: Esping-Andersen delineated three types of contemporary capitalist political economy: the free-market neoliberal polity (exemplified archetypally by the United States of America); the more communitarian conservative corporatism (exemplified by Germany) and the social democratic corporatism found in the Nordic countries (the prime example being Sweden). To these we added what we call the oriental corporatism of Japan.