Special issue: Punishment, values and local cultures

Abstract

This special issue contributes to a discussion that has become central to contemporary comparative penology: how best to explain convergences and divergences between Western states in their deployment of penal power. Its particular focus is on characteristics of local cultures and the underlying and distinct historical values that best account for jurisdictional particularities in penal policy and outcomes. The recent penal history of post-industrial societies is well described in a set of overarching, global narratives, including, for instance, those that describe and interpret the myriad consequences of the arrival of ‘late-modernity’ (e.g. Garland, 2001), as well as others that focus most on the ways in which the expansion of neo-liberal thinking and policy, and the withering of welfare states, have shaped justifications for and methods of state punishment and social control (e.g. Wacquant, 2009). However, the forces at work in these master narratives manifest differently at the national and jurisdictional levels. Thus, the punitive patterns and trajectories they shape in each are distinct and culturally embedded (Melossi, 2001), resulting in different penal policies, practices and outcomes. Two articles (by Karstedt and Snacken) in this special issue offer theoretical analyses of penal developments at the international level, while four focus on the changing penal contexts in four countries: the United States, Canada, Sweden and Australia. A comparison of their imprisonment rates per 100,000 of the population – which range from 707 (USA), to 114 (Canada), to 57 (Sweden) – presents widely different impressions of each country. A similarly divergent and variable pattern can be observed among the four selected Australian jurisdictions whose