Is a conservative just a liberal who has been mugged? Exploring the origins of punitive views
A. King and S. Maruna (2009)
As in the adage that `a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged', many presume that punitive public attitudes are derived from the direct experience of crime and victimization. People become `fed up' with criminality and seek to strike back at lawbreakers. Social theories of punitiveness, on the other hand, typically portray punitiveness as a form of scapegoating in which offenders are just a stand-in population, masking more abstract anxieties.
This survey was designed to explore both of these hypotheses with a sample of the British public. It found that factors such as concerns about the economy and the state of `the youth today' account for a substantial proportion of the effect of actual crime concerns on punitiveness. Crime-related factors, such as victimization experiences or anxieties about crime, on the other hand, do not appear to be strong predictors of punitiveness in this sample.
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Symbolic politics and penal populism: The long shadow of Willie Horton
T. Newburn and T. Jones (2005)
In this article, the authors outline a particular case of lesson-drawing that has had, they argue, a dramatic impact on British penal policy. This case, the defeat of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 US Presidential election, has had a long-lasting impact on electoral politics in the USA but also, we suggest, in the more specific arena of the mediated politics of crime control in the UK.
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Other Perspectives
The New Penology
M.M. Feeley and J. Simon (1992)
Before the concept of penal populism was developed, Feeley and Simon proposed that there was a ‘new penology’ emerging. They describe this new penology as shifting focus away from the individual, and towards an actuarial consideration of aggregates. This shift has facilitated the development of a vision that embraces reliance on imprisonment and that merges concerns for surveillance and custody. The concern has shifted away from punishing individuals to managing aggregates of dangerous groups, and that affects the training and practice of criminologists.
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Explanations of American punishment policies – a national history
M. Tonry (2009)
In a different approach, Tonry argues that none of the conventional explanations why American penal policies became so severe – rising crime rates, harsh public attitudes and cynical electoral politics – are persuasive. Nor are various ‘conditions of late modernity’ such as the limited capacities of governments, increasing population diversity or increasing insecurity and risk aversion.
All these things characterized every developed country in much of the period 1975–2000 and most did not adopt drastically harsher policies. Nor are such amorphous and over-generalized notions as ‘populist punitiveness’, ‘penal populism’ and neo-liberalism of much use. Some things do have explanatory power cross-nationally.
Moderate penal policies and low imprisonment rates are associated with low levels of income inequality, high levels of trust and legitimacy, strong welfare states, professionalized as opposed to politicized criminal justice systems and consensual rather than conflictual political cultures. For each of those factors, the United States falls at the wrong end of the distribution. The question is, Why? Four answers stand out: the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics; a Manichean moralism associated with fundamentalist religious views; the obsolescence of the American constitution; and the history of race relations in the USA.
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