Cultural peers and penal policies: A configurational approach toward mapping penal landscapes

Abstract

Globalization changed the comparative gaze and enterprise in criminology. The dialectics between global convergence and domestic divergence are nowhere more visible but in the realm of responses to crime. Rather than loosening their impact on penal justice and penal policies, cultural differences, national institutional settings and symbols are coming to the fore, and contemporary penal policies and systems develop along the fault lines of regions, the routes of colonial power or supra-national regimes. Recent conceptualizations of globalization focus on actors and mechanisms, thus advancing ‘agency-rich’ models in the comparison of penal systems. Using a ‘configurational comparative approach’ this article explores the role of ‘cultural peers’ in shaping the landscape of penal regimes in Europe. ‘Penal cultures’ and ‘cultures of control’ constitute two layers of configurations, each one with four peer groups. The European landscape of penal cultures and cultures of control emerges from different historic trajectories, different partners in and mechanisms of diffusion. Cultural and spatial nearness both are important, and processes of Europeanization seem to have an impact. Beyond convergence and divergence of penal regimes and cultures of control, Europe appears as a pluralistic community at best and a deeply divided one at worst.

Inequality and punishment: A global paradox?

“…Finland drastically reduced its imprisonment rate in the second half of the 20th century without major changes to its level of inequality in terms of income or other social structure indicators. Over the past decades, European countries have increased as well as decreased their prison populations without discernible and concomitant changes in social and economic inequality, except for the growth of the group of immigrants in these countries (Karstedt, 2015). For instance, while income inequality remained low and stable in Norway and the Netherlands between 1995 and 2015, the latter saw a singular spike in imprisonment rates in the early 2000s, while Norwegian imprisonment remained mostly stable at a low level.…”

Punishment, Youth Justice and Cultural Contingency: Towards a Balanced Approach

“…Given the different starting points for the decline (1993 in Ireland, 1994/1995 in Northern Ireland and 2001/2008 in England), it may be best to relate explanations to contemporaneous ‘critical junctures’ or ‘windows of opportunity’ such as the peace process in Northern Ireland, the crisis over residential care in the Republic (Kennedy, 1970) or the economic crisis in England. It may also be, as Karstedt (2015: 377) surmises, that smaller jurisdictions may be more likely to adopt criminal justice changes from abroad (such as restorative conferencing) than countries with a longer history or who can wield hegemonic power such as England. In any event, the extent to which these influences and different contexts served as catalysts for a ‘new’ juvenile justice in each of the jurisdictions remains speculative in the absence of further, more nuanced research (for some good starting points, see Bateman, 2012a; Hamilton and Carr, 2013; Dwyer and McAlister, 2013).…”

Political Economy or Political Systems? How Welfare Capitalism and Political Systems Affect Law and Order Policies in Twenty Western Industrialised Nations

“…Second, we use six different variables linked to law and order policies in a broadly defined way, and hierarchical cluster analysis to investigate whether countries cluster in distinct groups. Hence, we move beyond the analysis of imprisonment rates, which has been the standard approach in criminology for years, and use a broader concept of law and order (more on this in the section on research design, operationalisation, data and methods) (for a similar endeavour, see Karstedt, 2015). We indeed find three different country clusters that resemble more the worlds of welfare capitalism and less the types of democracy.…”