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British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on August 27, 2008
British Journal of Criminology 2008 48(6):720-734; doi:10.1093/bjc/azn057
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The British Journal of Criminology 48:720-734 (2008)
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Rise of the Penal State

Neo-Liberalization or New Political Culture?

Willem de Koster*, Jeroen van der Waal, Peter Achterberg and Dick Houtman

* Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands; dekoster{at}fsw.eur.nl.


  Abstract

Imprisonment rates are presumed to have risen in the West, and it is argued by certain social scientists that this can be explained by a comprehensive process of economic neo-liberalization. In this paper, we develop an alternative explanation, focusing on the rise of a ‘new political culture’. Longitudinal cross-national analyses are performed to test the tenability of these theories. First, it is demonstrated that some countries have been witnessing a trend of penalization, but that there is no overall trend. Second, economic explanations for variations in imprisonment rates prove to be untenable. Third, it is shown that a new-rightist demand for social order, which is not found to be inspired by economic neo-liberalization, provides a better explanation. This leads to the conclusion that high incarceration rates can be understood as being part of a right-authoritarian politico-cultural complex.


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