ABSTRACT
This chapter maps the extent of 'criminalization', noting an increase in the number of laws and harsh punishments being handed out in the UK, Australia and the US, but to a lesser extent in France and Spain. One way of mapping the 'punitive turn' involves counting the number of people given prison sentences. Incarceration rates are broadly up and stable in the UK, Australia and US, while crime rates are decreasing. All the neoliberal countries have higher rates of imprisonment than all the conservative countries, which in turn are higher than the Nordic social democracies. In the name of promoting security, neoliberal regimes will exclude both those who fail in the economic marketplace and those who fail to abide by the law – in the latter case by imprisonment or, even more radically, by execution. The freedom/security antimony is the fault line that runs deep through liberalism and produces typical patterns of 'crazed governance'.
