The Prisoners’ Dilemma

"Mass imprisonment in America has stimulated intense interest in cross-national variations in imprisonment rates and the character of prison regimes: is the rest of the democratic world doomed to follow that trajectory? David Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001) sees the logic of late modernity, in both the USA and Britain, as fuelling a ‘prison works’ mentality which translates into far more punitive sentencing. Cavadino and Dignan’s (2006) Penal Systems: A Comparative Approach locates the key difference between 12 societies across the globe in the nature of their political economies. The more social democratic societies of western Europe have rates of prison population only one-seventh of that of neo-liberal America, with Britain’s at the upper end of the European spectrum and drifting relentlessly higher. Both major political parties in Britain are planning a further 10,000 prison places. Lacey integrates these and other findings with an analysis of the importance of political culture as well as political economy. The most notable feature is the contrast between the first-past-the-post adversarial system in the more neo-liberal societies and the more consensual politics of the co-ordinated market economies such as Germany and the Nordic countries. In the former, crime control has become a competitive arms race with electoral implications; in the latter, criminal justice policies are shielded in key respects from partisan politics. Other differences inherent in the greater inclusiveness of social and welfare policies in the more social democratic countries, and in media exploitation of the crime issue. There is a David Green book called When Children Kill Children that compares the Jamie Bulger case in Britain (when a toddler was murdered by two ten-year-old boys) to a similar case in Norway. In Britain we demonised the children but in Norway there was a protective reaction towards everyone involved, the child-murderers, the families of all the children. The key difference is the political culture. In Norway crime isn’t an index of moral decay and everyone was concerned to protect those involved in an isolated tragedy. Lacey finds grounds for cautious optimism in the extent to which these countries have maintained penal moderation in the teeth of strong pressures to ‘govern through crime’ and strong welfare states in the face of pressures to privatise and marketise health, education and social services more generally."