The politics of punishment and the world economy

This paper seeks to provide a novel theoretical framework for the interpretation of international trends in state and public punitiveness over recent decades. The analysis offers a critique of standard accounts of the political economy of punishment, and calls for an enriched perspective that pays consideration to pressures on state-level policy-making from the global economy, on the one hand, and the domestic psychosocial environment, on the other. To demonstrate the need for such a perspective, the paper goes beyond the Anglophone world to the European periphery