2 - Explaining penal tolerance and severity: criminal justice in the perspective of political economy

Summary

We have seen that, notwithstanding the currency of diagnoses of a ‘culture of control’ or tendency to ‘govern through crime’, leading to a massive increase in the exercise of the state's penal power, this characterisation fits some societies far better than others. Cavadino and Dignan's recent comparative analysis of imprisonment rates, youth justice arrangements and privatisation policies in twelve countries generates a fourfold typology of rather different families of criminal justice system, nested within different kinds of political economy: the neo-liberal, the conservative-corporatist, the oriental-corporatist and the social-democratic. The social-democratic systems of Scandinavia have succeeded in sustaining relatively humane and moderate penal policies in the period during which some of the neo-liberal countries – most notably the USA – have been moving in the direction of mass incarceration and ever greater penal harshness along a number of dimensions, with the different kinds of corporatist economy also showing striking differences from the neo-liberal cases. The dystopian current in contemporary penal theory, it would seem, has been written from the perspective of a local analysis of neo-liberal polities, erroneously transposed into an account which purports to have global implications.

Yet there is a serious question lurking beneath this theoretical over-generalisation: that of whether, in an increasingly mobile and interdependent world, other countries are likely to be pulled along a path towards the ever-greater penal harshness which marks the world's only super-power. This is the question to which I shall turn in the next chapter.