ABSTRACT

Methodological doubts took both positivistic and phenomenological forms. This chapter argues that these doubts have for the past few decades been contained to allow a burgeoning of comparative criminology, but far from exclusively - in the cross-national analysis of trends in criminal justice policy and prison systems. The formula for 'governing through crime' and harsher trends in criminal justice seems applicable to the United States since the mid-1970s and Britain since 1993. In a comprehensive analysis of crime and criminal justice in Belgium, Sonja Snacken spelt out how punitive policy and discourse had been relatively restrained. Restorative justice have the potential to act as a counterweight and a counter-narrative to that of 'prison works', which has become the mantra of the exponents of the neo-liberal punitive turn. Globalization has not led to the wholesale adoption of the neo-liberal form of capitalist political economy, nor the 'punitive turn' that it allegedly generates.