ABSTRACT
This book is both an end and a beginning. It is an end result of CRIMPREV, a Coordinated Action financed by the European Union under the 6th Framework Programme from 2006 to 2009, in which we organized a comparative seminar looking into factors enhancing or restraining primary and secondary criminalization in Europe. The seminar was organized in April 2007 at the start of the project. The authors of the different chapters in this book were also the original contributors to the seminar. Since that date, the field we were discussing has known significant developments. As such, this book participates in a broader movement which has developed over the last years aiming at understanding punitiveness and the mechanisms behind it by analysing both similarities (e.g. Garland 2001; Wacquant 2006) and national differences in punishment trends between countries (e.g. Tonry 2001, 2007; Whitman 2003; Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Lacey 2008). The emphasis on ‘resistance’, however, indicates that this book wants to look at factors in those mechanisms that allow for choices to be made, primarily at the political and judicial levels. It attempts to do so within a ‘European’ context, in which ‘Europe’ is understood both in a comparative sense, looking at differences between European states, and in an institutional sense, looking at European institutions such as the Council of Europe or the European Union. We therefore do not claim to deal in this book with all the ‘risk and protective factors’ (Tonry 2007: 13-38) known to influence levels of punitiveness in different countries. This book wants to discuss a selection of what could be perceived as protective factors in a more horizontal, transnational way, trying to understand how these may – or may not or only partly – contribute to the aim of achieving more ‘penal moderation’ (Loader 2010) in Europe.
