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Willem de Koster, Jeroen van der Waal, Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, The Rise of the Penal State: Neo-Liberalization or New Political Culture?, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 48, Issue 6, November 2008, Pages 720–734, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azn057
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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.