Politics and penal change: Towards an interpretive political analysis of penal policymaking

This article offers an interpretive political analysis framework, exploring and asserting its value for understanding penal change. It is argued that this approach serves, in part, to emphasise the importance of the minutiae of political activity: the crucial impact that apparently minor decisions, unimportant participants, or particular ‘rules of the game’ can play in specific outcomes. It emphasises the importance of human agency and meaning: the relationship between politics and fate. It facilitates the connections of particular ‘micro’ analyses with ‘macro’ accounts of penal change. I argue that the approach set out here thereby enables us to place centre stage the beliefs and practices of policy participants, and the political dynamics of policymaking. By doing so, particular case studies serve as valuable ‘windows’ into the meanings in action that iteratively make sense of, respond to, and thereby (re‐)constitute the realities in which actors operate, specific penal outcomes, and broader penal change