Patterns of crime and punishment in the USA greatly magnify corresponding developments in other liberal market economies -Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK -faced with similar broad macro-technological transformations, namely the collapse of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s and the development of knowledge economies in the 1990s and 2000s. In this article, we set out the case for seeing these differences as largely the product of dynamics shaped by the institutional structure of the US political system. We focus on the exceptional direct and indirect role of local democracy in key policy areas including law and order and beyond that in residential zoning, in public education and in incorporation of suburbs, which has no parallel in the other Anglo-Saxon polities, and which magnifies through residential and educational segregation and concentrated poverty the social problems caused by socio-economic developments.

What do you do when faced with wrongdoing—do you blame or do you forgive? Especially when confronted with offences that lie on the more severe end of the spectrum and cause terrible psychological or physical trauma or death, nothing can feel more natural than blame. Indeed, in the UK and the USA, increasingly vehement and righteous public expressions of blame and calls for vengeance have become commonplace; correspondingly, contemporary penal philosophy has witnessed a resurgence of the retributive tradition, in the modern form usually known as the ‘justice’ model. On the other hand, people can and routinely do forgive others, even in cases of severe crime. Evolutionary psychologists argue that both vengeance and forgiveness are universal human adaptations that have evolved as alternative responses to exploitation, and, crucially, strategies for reducing risk of re-offending. We are naturally endowed with both capacities: to blame and retaliate, or to forgive and seek to repair relations. Which should we choose? Drawing on evolutionary psychology, we offer an account of forgiveness and argue that the choice to blame, and not to forgive, is inconsistent with the political values of a broadly liberal society and can be instrumentally counter-productive to reducing the risk of future re-offending. We then sketch the shape of penal philosophy and criminal justice policy and practice with forgiveness in place as a guiding ideal.

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In this lecture, I address recent attempts to understand the relevance of political forces and institutions in shaping the practice and the social meaning of punishment. I focus on one argument about the relevance of the political which has been especially influential during the last decade. This is the 'neoliberal penality thesis': the argument that politics can usefully be characterised as broadly neoliberal, or as social democratic: and that the decline or attenuation of social democracy, and the concomitant rise of neoliberalism have been associated with an intensification of penality. I sketch what I take to be the key arguments for that thesis, before presenting a critique of both its method and its substantive conclusions. Though exponents of the neoliberal penality thesis often present it as an ambitious, general theory, I argue that it fails the key test to be applied to any such account: viz, does it have the capacity to shed explanatory light on the relationship between punishment and society? The shortcomings of the neoliberal penality thesis at an explanatory level derive, I argue, from a failure to explicate just which political, economic and social institutions constitute neoliberalism; how, systematically, they relate to one another; and precisely how they are implicated in producing neoliberal penality. These problems may best be illuminated by asking not only what neoliberalism 'is' but also analytic, historical and comparative questions about how it has emerged and what sorts of institutional structures are needed to sustain the policies, practices and arrangements which have come to be associated with neoliberalism; when they emerged; and where they hold sway. In conclusion, and in consequence, I make the case for a more differentiated and specifically institutional account of the defining features of political systems integrated within a broad comparative political economy of punishment.

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