ABSTRACT
We can ascertain the form that these barriers can take by examining how three societies – Canada, Germany and Finland – remained resistant to penal populism as it gained strength elsewhere.
Canada
If the globalization of knowledge and ideas was indeed such an automated process, then Canada, as the United States’ northern neighbour should have been among the first to follow its penal example. Its rate of imprisonment should now be amongst those that bear the closest correspondence to that of the United States, 738 per 100,000 of population. Yet remarkably, its prison population has been in decline – from a rate of 131 per 100,000 of population in 1995 to 107 in 2003. What seems to have happened in this country is what Meyer and O’Malley (2005: 214) refer to as a ‘glocalizing reaction’ to the United States’ trends: that is, the assertion of regional or national autonomy in the face of global pressures. There seems to have been a widespread consensus in Canadian political and bureaucratic circles that the United States’ crime control options have been a disaster and should not be repeated in Canada. This has meant that, in relation to penal policy, populist strategies have been able to make little headway there. While the simplistic and guileful slogans – three strikes, zero tolerance and so on – which emanate from penal development in the United States have been flashed around the world (Franko Aas 2005), Canada has had the benefit of more old fashioned neighbourly communication with that country and sees its realities very clearly. As a result, it prefers a ‘Canadian way’ of dealing with social problems, in much the same way that it wants other aspects of Canadian life to reflect the identity of that
in which, inter alia, he promised to virtually abolish parole and increase the prison population by another 50 percent (Brash 2004), an opinion poll found that 56 percent of those surveyed actually supported parole when accompanied by appropriate levels of community supervision;3 similarly an opinion poll in 2006 found that 56 percent of those surveyed favoured spending more on community punishments rather than prisons.4
