ABSTRACT
This book is about penal reform and penal politics. But although several chapters uplift with tales of reformist endeavour, more tell a depressingly familiar story: of old and discredited penologies masquerading as new: and of the unexpected and retrogressively oppressive consequences of the best-intentioned reforms. Indeed, pessimists may have already concluded that in relation to penal reform ‘nothing works’, and, moreover, that this is inevitably so because of the seeming power of the state to incorporate all reformist discourse into the administrative machinery of the prison and the courts. One reading of what follows might suggest that that is my argument in this chapter. Such a reading would be unfortunate.
