Introduction: Interpreting penal policymaking

This special issue contributes to the efforts to understand and explain penal change by exploring and illustrating what it means to examine penal policymaking through a range of interpretive lenses and via a number of specific case studies. There is, at present, renewed interest in the exploration of penal change and the political dynamics that drive, underpin, and relate to, developments in penal policy and practice (see, for example, Barker and Miller 2017; Birkett 2018; Goodman, Page and Phelps 2017; Jennings et al. 2018; Lacey, Soskice and Hope 2018; Loader and Sparks 2016; Reiner 2017). This latest wave of scholarship is situated within, and owes great intellectual debts to, a rich extant literature whose foundations, due to the interdisciplinary nature of penological scholarship, span law, sociology, philosophy, social theory, political science, and beyond