My chapter will be divided into two main parts. The first part will consider the issue of the transferability of legal and social institutions from nation to nation and culture to culture. In this section I will draw upon the literature relating to so-called “legal transplants”, as well as upon recent comparisons of the penal culture prevailing in different societies. These discourses seek to determine the extent to which legal institutions and criminal justice policies are a reflection of particular constellations of social, political, economic or cultural variables. Such analyses have implications for the extent to which policy-making bodies have “freedom of choice” in proposing the legal institutions or criminal justice policies appropriate for adoption in a particular nation, or whether the character of these institutions and policies will be predetermined by the political and other variables referred to.