ABSTRACT
This collective volume takes its starting point from the editors’ concern about recent developments in criminal justice systems in which the growth of imprisonment has been accompanied not simply by longer prison sentences but by penal laws which seem to abandon long-standing limits to punishment in modern societies. For many scholars this change is seen as a concomitant of the globally influenced move to neoliberalism 1 in the workings of economics and politics. But, for others, the fact that punishment is going up worldwide in places with different types of economic and political systems, including those which are far from ‘modern’, suggests that imitation is more important than underlying conditions ( Pavarini, 2004). The mechanisms that link variations in economics, politics, and culture are also somewhat opaque. The main way this works in Anglo-American type societies seems to be that when the state is challenged by the pressures of globalization, politicians choose to adopt penological approaches that downgrade the status of criminal justice professionals in favour of ill-informed and intolerant public opinion. The editors of this collection, however, rightly note that such mechanisms may not be universal and that the developments that worry them are in any case differently advanced in different parts of the world. They were therefore especially interested in contributions that aimed to explain punishment trends in what they describe as ‘non-punitive societies’.
