3 - Inclusion and exclusion in a globalising world: is penal moderation in co-ordinated market economies under threat?

Summary

In the first part of this book, I argued that recent literature on the different political-economic structures of contemporary societies could help us to understand the genesis of the striking differences in punishment exposed by comparative research. Penal policy and practice, I argued, are nested in, and their dynamics driven by, a broader institutional and cultural environment. Only by analysing this broader environment, and by analysing it in terms of concrete institutions such as welfare states, professional bureaucracies, electoral systems and labour market and training structures, could we move beyond generalisations such as ‘neo-liberal’ polities and come to a genuinely explanatory understanding of the varying dynamics of punishment in the contemporary world. Systematic institutional differences between two broad families of advanced capitalism, I argued, helped to illuminate varying patterns of penal severity across developed countries. The relatively disorganised, individualistic ‘liberal market economies’ such as the USA and the UK could be shown to be particularly vulnerable to the hold of ‘penal populism’, while the ‘co-ordinated market economies’ of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, with their proportionally representative political systems and economies focusing on long-term investment in specialist skills providing a reliable bridge to employment, were better placed to resist pressures for penal expansion. This differentiated analysis helped not only to account for Cavadino and Dignan's recent findings, but to put some institutional flesh on the bones of earlier work such as David Greenberg's demonstration of the correlation between the size of prison population and the degree to which different European countries embraced what he called an ‘incorporative stance’ towards less well-off citizens.