Penal changes, crises, and the political economy of punishment: An introduction

Abstract

Back at the turn of the century, various influential works warned against criminology scholars’ inclination to easily identify epochal changes in the field of crime and penality (Garland, 2001; Hutchinson, 2006; O’Malley, 2000; O’Malley and Meyer, 2005; Sparks and Loader, 2004). This caution against so-called “criminologies of catastrophe” was and still is particularly pertinent. Academic communities should avoid falling into the fallacy of constantly seeing penal changes as watershed shifts that completely mutate the contours of penal policies and practices, thereby losing sight of the manifold continuities from the past (Sozzo, 2018a, 2018b). In a Heraclitean fashion, though, criminology debates should also not overlook the unstable and constantly changing nature of penal arrangements (Goodman et al., 2015, 2017). This shifting penal terrain is theoretically challenging, since it requires specific efforts aimed at frequently updating analytical frameworks. In partial contrast to the criminologies of catastrophe thesis, recurring updating tasks may have much to gain from leveraging the notion of crisis. In fact, crises can be seen as turning points, as privileged observation posts fromwhich the potential obsolescence of a given theory can be tested. As in Gramsci’s (1930/2011) concept of crisis, these turning points do not always lead to the consolidation of a precisely defined, new configuration. Nonetheless, crises are uniquely useful to revitalize academic approaches to a given phenomenon. This special issue embraces the conception of crises as vantage points for exploration. More precisely, it uses that lens to reflect on the political economy of punishment (hereinafter, PEofP). That academic perspective particularly thrived in the 1970s and 1980s,