ABSTRACT
This chapter has a simple argument: our narratives of penal change must be reassessed and complemented by analyses that adopt a self-conscious global context. I want to suggest that most analyses of the new punitiveness have tended to misunderstand the terrain of analysis, being unduly constrained by an implicit identification of society, or community, with notions of self-sustaining systems. Put simply: in modernity no ‘society’ or ‘nation-state’ should be treated as if they were a self-sustaining system; all are part of a global entity. However, it is precisely such an awareness that is excluded from much of our everyday analysis and consciousness; further, the extent to which the local is a product of the global and their interconnections is downplayed in modernity in order to construct and preserve ideologies of ‘doing justice’ or striving to balance competing rights. The relationship between conceiving global justice and modern forms of development is problematic, and one may suspect that a global justice is precisely what modernity is not orientated towards. In contrast, what this chapter tries to highlight is that the biggest non-punitive area we inhabit is the global international system. The century just concluded perhaps saw the greatest amount of inter-human slaughter, rape, and destruction of property of any century; in partial recognition of which we even created a new crime, genocide, but in the face of which extremely few persons were ever punished. Our focus on specific sites of punitiveness needs to be complemented by recognizing an irrational non-punitiveness also operating outside the specific terrains we focus upon. Moreover, that may aid in better identifying the forms of power at work on both sides of the supposed divide.
