The Political Economy of Penality and the Sociology of Punishment – Past and Present

Toward the end of the 1960s, the criminological fi eld saw the emergence of some critical perspectives which in fact revolutionised the theoretical coordinates of this discipline. At its origins, ‘criminology’ was the study of the problem of crime, more than the study of the problem of punishment. That is to say, criminology considered punishments, criminal policies and strategies of social control only under the point of view of their impact on crime. For a long time criminology has been a savoir whose object was the production of effective strategies for the government of deviance and criminality. Thus, it is easy to understand why the study of social and individual causes of crime played such an important role within the priorities of criminological research.