ABSTRACT
In the last two decades the tariff of acceptable pain that could be legitimately directed towards deviant populations appears to have increased. This is evident particularly in the United States but its imprint can also be seen in other English-speaking jurisdictions such as the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and, in a less pronounced form, in other European societies. This punitive turn has moved hand in hand with a significant shift in the way in which penal values have been conceived. From a modern penal economy where justice was imagined in terms that sought limits to pain, equivalence in sentencing, and which sought to invest productively in offenders, in the new punitiveness we witness the resurrection of an alternative economy premised upon values that emphasize the legitimacy of pain, visceral sentencing, and destructive punishment (Hallsworth, 2002).
