It is now common in the sociology of punishment to lament that comparative penology has not matured as an area of research. While there have been seminal works in the comparative canon, their conceptual tools tend to be drawn from grand narratives and macro-structural perspectives. Comparative researchers therefore lack concepts that can help capture the complexity of penality within a single nation, limiting the cross-national perspective. Why is this relative lack of comparative refinement still the case? This article investigates this question by looking specifically at penal exceptionalism, a concept central to comparative penology. While punitiveness as a comparative and descriptive category has been critiqued, its converse, penal exceptionalism remains prevalent but undertheorised. Examining exceptionalism reveals that it is not merely the macro-structural approach to comparison that has limited the development of cross-national sociology of punishment, but the Anglocentric assumptions, which are the bedrock of comparative penology. In this essay, I argue that penal exceptionalism versus punitiveness is an Anglocentric formulation. These taken-for-granted assumptions have become so central to the comparative enterprise that they act as a barrier to developing new innovative comparative frameworks and concepts. The article concludes by suggesting some methodological strategies that are intended as a way of helping comparative penology to expand its toolkit and support the ongoing development of more equitable criminological knowledge.

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The Republic of Ireland is said to be an exception within Anglophone penal history, where it resisted the punitive turn of the 1970s and a more pragmatic and dispassionate penal politics prevailed. Even during the 1970s, when Ireland displayed tendencies towards penal welfarism, this is argued to have been more rhetorical mimicry than commitment to the principles of offender transformation. This article first interrogates these claims by providing an in-depth historical and sociological analysis of penal culture and transformation in the prison system in Ireland in the 1970s. By conducting this analysis in conversation with penological theory, in this case penal welfarism, the study presents a new concept of parsimonious penal power: pastoral penality. Pastoral penality was a more humane penal culture that emerged during the 1970s in Ireland. It is hoped that these historical and theoretical contributions developed throughout this paper contribute to the shifting and deepening of our USA and UK-centric understandings of punishment history and patterns.The key features of penal welfarism are presented first. This is followed by an overview of the main conventions in Irish penal and social historiography. The substantive historical findings from the research are then outlined. The evidence reveals a counter-narrative of an intentional and highly principled penal transformation led by those who held the power to imprison. The concept of pastoral penality is then forwarded. This was a more humane and empathetic approach to imprisonment that reflects Ireland's socio-cultural and political context, shaped by a conservative political ethos, Catholic values and a communitarian class structure. A wider lens then permits us to also to see that this form of penality was contingent on Ireland's distinctive field of social control, however. The article concludes by acknowledging the structural and practical limits of pastoral penal welfarism but emphasising that while pastoral penality is non-abolitionist it operates with a deep scepticism of the prison and an awareness of the harms it causes.

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