ABSTRACT
Work on the social analysis of punishment during the past three decades has arguably neglected the impact of a commitment to welfare on the scale of imprisonment. For the first seven decades of the past century, the principal hope of criminologists, penal reformers and most politicians was that welfare, the ‘welfare state’ and allied forms of social provision for human needs would lead to a reduction in both crime and the need for punishment. However, the apparently remorseless rise in crime rates from the mid-1950s until, in most countries, the mid-1990s eroded that confidence. Moreover, the watershed of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when researchers threw doubt on the efficacy of treatment programmes, saw those hopes dashed and their assumptions fundamentally challenged. As a result, the past 30 years have seen a dramatic decline in optimism about welfare in relation to crime and punishment. Despite continued growth in welfare investment and provision, it is viewed as lacking any real purchase on the character of crime and punishment. The era of ‘penal welfarism’ is seen as ceding ground to the era of the ‘culture of control’ (Garland 1985, 2001), with welfare an increasingly marginal variable in criminal justice policy and practice.
