NCJ Number
225440
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 48 Issue: 6 Dated: November 2008 Pages: 720-734
Date Published
November 2008
Length
15 pages
Annotation
As an alternative to Loic Wacquant’s economic theory of the cause of rising imprisonment rates in North American, Western Europe, and Australia, this article develops the theory of a “new political culture” as the driving force behind rising imprisonment rates.
Abstract
Wacquant (2002, 2008) has developed a comprehensive materialist explanation for the ongoing trend of imprisonment. In publications entitled, “Prisons of Poverty” and “Punishing the Poor,” he advances neo-Marxist reasoning that views imprisonment as a way of incapacitating and punishing poor people who have no place in the socioeconomic mainstream and engage in adaptive behaviors that disturb and threaten the relatively affluent and well-connected mainstream. Based on data regarding imprisonment rates, ideological measures, and welfare state measures from the United States, Western European countries, and Australia, the authors of this article propose an alternative theory, i.e., that the rising imprisonment rate is primarily related to the rise of a new-rightist political culture that emphasizes autonomous personal responsibility combined with priority for social order and a free-enterprise economic system governed by competition and limited or no government intervention. Individuals who threaten the social order and/or lack the skills, knowledge, and personal characteristics needed to secure legitimate employment in such a system are threatened with severe punishment, namely, incarceration, if they engage in survival or adaptive behaviors that violate the law. The rise in the imprisonment rates in the examined countries, however, is not related to an increase in crime. Rather the increased incarceration rate has occurred in association with the advent of new-right governments that prefer to use punitive measures in order to control bad behavior rather than to identify and intervene in ways that address the causes. 4 tables, 66 references, and appendix