ABSTRACT
Criminology, particularly of the critical sort, is a discipline besotted with catastrophic change (O'Malley, 2000). But a change has come over the way in which catastrophes are characterized. In an earlier generation of criminology, most of the imagined catastrophes were progressively revolutionary in nature and implication. In the 1960s and 1970s, crises of one sort or another were about to precipitate major changes in modern capitalism and its criminal justice apparatuses. Staggering under fiscal and legitimation crises, the capitalist state was dramatically restructuring. Decarceration was one of these changes, informal justice another. Both were predicted to empty the prisons, lighten the hand of criminal justice, and reduce or externalize the criminal justice expenditures. Thirty or forty years later, another – but radically different – crisis has been detected by critical criminologists. The 1960s now have been made to appear as a ‘golden age’ of penal modernism in which a therapeutic correctionalism was ‘hegemonic’. The new catastrophe is a Dark Age of criminal justice characterised by ‘economies of excess’, ‘decivilizing processes’, ‘populist vengeance’, and so on – in short, the ‘death of penal modernism’. It is seen to be replaced by exclusionary regimes characterized by savage punishments, mass imprisonment, and incapacitation. It is said to be driven by a punitive state that in turn is responding to the failure of penal modernism to reduce crime, and by the demands of a disillusioned and angry populace.
