ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, our society’s attitude towards criminals has become increasingly intolerant, hostile and exclusionary. Offenders are increasingly represented in political rhetoric and popular culture as ‘some kind of external threat, as people who are different from ourselves and who do not properly belong in our society and against whom we need to raise physical defences or who ought to be contained in their ghettoes or failing that in prison’ (D. Faulkner, cited in Cayley 1998: 32).1
