ABSTRACT
This chapter situates our project on Penal Cultures on the Continent within the international debate, explains key concepts for our research and gives an outline of the book. For many of the classical texts with a focus on the US/UK perspective, there has been a debate in Continental European countries about whether these narratives also hold true for one’s own country. In some texts, the US has been contrasted with Continental European countries directly or categories of countries have been developed according to political regime indicators such as the model of the welfare state or of democracy in which the US usually sticks out. France and Germany are sometimes placed in the same, sometimes in different categories. In a more recent strand of European research, the concept of penal moderation has been developed, which we are going to explore further in this book. As the following chapters will show, the situation in France and Germany follows this path of penal moderation, although this does not mean that punitive attitudes and desires are completely suppressed.
