Abstract
This review essay combines the comments made by David Brown, Russell Hogg and Mark Finanne at the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: 2nd International Conference July 2013. It is followed by a rejoinder by the two authors John Pratt and Anna Eriksson.
Highlights
John Pratt and Anna Eriksson’s Contrasts in Punishment (2013) is a book which makes a major contribution to the relatively new field of comparative penology
It confronts the radical pessimism of the miserablist: ‘it’s getting worse everywhere’ sort, which in turn feeds into the ‘and there is not much you can do about it’. For if it isn’t the same everywhere, if it’s not rooted in the global might of neo‐liberalism sweeping everything before it or in some inherently punitive human nature or Kantian requirement for punishment, we might be able to learn how to do at least some things otherwise. It enlivens a politics of penality, at a local level, a politics of contest, challenge and engagement with the detail, the proposals, the cultural climate and context, which are not determined by overwhelming forces largely beyond our control but constructed out of social relations, mentalities, cultural forms and sensibilities in which we all take part
Pratt and Eriksson organise their analysis around the two clusters – Nordic social democratic and Anglophone liberal – and ask the central question: ‘what is it about these types of societies that can account for their different ways of thinking about punishment?’ They attempt to answer this question sociologically and, rather than reading the answer off from a broad analysis of differences in political economy, seek the answers in the way cultural differences have been produced in the two clusters, by meticulously and in rich detail uncovering and explaining the production of cultural difference
Summary
John Pratt and Anna Eriksson’s Contrasts in Punishment (2013) is a book which makes a major contribution to the relatively new field of comparative penology. This field, which compares imprisonment rates and measures of punitiveness across different societies or, as here, different clusters of societies – the Nordic comprising Sweden, Norway and Finland on the one hand; and, on the other, the Anglophone comprising England, New Zealand and Australia (New South Wales) – has been very fertile in recent years, as is evident from the work of Cavadino and Dignan (2006), Nicola Lacey (2008) and David Green (2008), among many others.
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