ABSTRACT
Developing a better understanding of evolutions in ‘punitivity’, and in particular the role of victims and the victims movement therein, is not a simple task. This chapter aims at contributing to this analysis. In this exercise, the concept of ‘punitivity’ will be used to refer to the interrelated levels of the individual, social and judicial opinions, attitudes and conducts (Kury et al. 2004). ‘Punitivity’ often has a negative connotation when being associated with the evolution towards a harsher penal climate in society or the uncritical, disproportionate and inadequate application of criminal justice (de Roos 1994: 45–6). This concern is justified. Many observers in western countries assume that during recent decades the criminal justice system ‘has endured a substantial punitive intensification on many fronts’ and that the spirit of the age is characterized by an ‘expansive punitivity’. This punitivity also reveals itself in social language as well as in policies of local authorities, companies and other fields of society (Kelk 1994). This ‘upward spiral movement’ in penal policies appears to be at odds with commonly accepted (legal) conceptions regarding parsimony, subsidiarity and minimal intervention by criminal justice. The criminal justice’s fundamental orientation on legal protection and power balances threatens to be pushed into the background, the offender decays into an object of judicial intervention and social reintegration – instead of being a right – becomes a condition. Until the early 1990s the punitive turn could be explained as a logical consequence of increasing crime rates, yet this way of legitimation has lost its credibility from the middle in the 1990s during which time a stagnation or even decrease in conventional types of violent and property crime has been observed in western countries (van Dijk et al. 2007). All this seems to confirm that criminal justice and punishment are not merely predetermined by unambiguous and rational processes. They are rather part of a broader societal and cultural phenomenon of ‘penality’ (Garland 1990), and we will investigate the victim’s potential role in evolutions concerning punitivity from this approach.
