ABSTRACT
The transformation of Fordist societies, and their displacement by competitive market society, has been accompanied by three definitive developments in what sociologists have been used to speaking of as the institutions or the structure of social control. The extraordinary increase in the numbers of citizens of Western societies being incarcerated in those societies' prisons is clearly in need of explanation. Adrian Howe provides the following helpful and succinct summary of Rusche's argument: an abundance of land and a labour shortage gave rise to a relatively lenient penal system in thirteenth-century Europe. Dario Melossi's review of Punishment and Social Structure, published in 1978, is critical of that text for its excessive reliance on the concept of the 'labour market' as an instrument for the analysis of the expansion or decline in the use of penal discipline. Liberal social science, and cultural studies, have for some time been entranced by what has been called 'the Foucault Effect'.
