Whither the Punitive Turn?

Abstract

The punitive consequences of New Labour’s penal policy are indisputable, even though they may vary considerably from region to region. In the UK, increasing numbers of people are now locked up in penal institutions or placed under the surveillance of the criminal law. This trend has been accompanied by the rise of a discourse about the crime problem which tends to demonise offenders and potential offenders, pitting their interests against those of the crime victim and thus exacerbating their exclusion from mainstream society. However, it might be argued that trends in penal policy have not been unidirectional. According to Cavadino, Crow and Dignan, drawing on the work of Andrew Rutherford, punitive and managerialist approaches to criminal justice sit alongside a human rights approach which attempts to ensure fairness and due process within the criminal justice system (Cavadino et al., 1999, pp. 45–8). They recognise that this approach ‘has never been central to governmental criminal justice policy’ but they consider that it may be embodied in attempts to reform offenders, to involve victims and offenders in restorative justice programmes and in a preoccupation with ‘just deserts’ sentencing. Successive New Labour governments showed an interest in all three of these policies. As we noted above, there was a continued commitment to offender reform, exemplified by the considerable investment in prisoner education.