ABSTRACT
It has almost become commonsensical to situate the crisis of Fordism in the fi rst half of the 1970s – and more precisely in 1973, the year of the huge ‘oil crisis’. Rigid periodisations like this are always questionable, because it is quite diffi cult to defi ne precise historical moments in which dramatic transitions begin and paradigmatic shifts take place. However, if this criticism seems perfectly reasonable for economic facts, this does not seem to be case for the transformations which took place in the fi eld of penal strategies in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In other words, in this case it seems possible to identify a clear watershed: and this can be found in the same years in which the crisis of Fordism has been located. There is also a geographical context where the rupture fi rst emerged: the United States.
