Punishment & Society

Extant research on the relationship between political systems and state punitiveness has so far paid little attention to the impact that transition from one political system to another may have upon levels and patterns of state punitiveness. This risks not only exaggerating the degree to which given trends in state punitiveness are distinct to particular political systems but also overlooking the legacy that punitive policies, practices or experiences under a prior political system may bequeath its successor. With a view to advancing a better understanding of the relationship between political systems and state punitiveness, we draw on the case of Greece, taking a long historical perspective to chart the trajectory of punitive state policies and practices in the country before, during and after its dictatorship of 1967–1974.

In this paper, I will analyze the metamorphosis of penal policy during the process of democratization of the last three decades in Argentina. The beginning of the transition was characterized by an elitist, formalist, and expert-driven mode of penal policy-making that produced several initiatives towards penal moderation. In this context, a certain contraction of punitiveness was produced. This pattern changed in the 1990s. In the context of the extreme neoliberal reforms, some initiatives had emerged oriented towards the increase of penal severity and extension, in an ambivalent landscape. But in the second half of this decade, penal populism emerged “from above” as a reaction of the elites that changed radically the mode of penal policy-making and fueled a great growth of punitiveness. After the crisis of 2001, there was a new wave of penal populism “from below” supported by strong social mobilizations around the figure of the victim. This radical mutation of the mode and orientation of penal policy-making generated an image of an epochal change that seemed to set up a new relationship between penalty and democracy. However, in the mid-2000s some symptoms of blockage of penal populism started to appear, creating tensions and contradictions still present today.

This article discusses the apparent contradictions, and consequences, of the state’s embracing of democratic ‘community’ based criminal justice initiatives, in tandem with long-term imprisonment, in the context of vigilantism in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. I argue that vigilante practices are part of a continuum of community-based crime prevention and punishment practices, where the legal and illegal are blurred, and with which the state is complicit. Looking back, from the vantage point of 2014 to the time when South Africa emerged from apartheid rule and held its first democratic elections, in April 1994, it is clear that mass democracy has had an uneasy relationship with the liberal values enshrined in the Constitution. I argue that punitive punishment is one of the consequences of the state’s turn toward democratic localism and its embracing of a discourse that encourages communities to take responsibility for crime prevention. The danger of rallying ‘communities’ around combating crime is that it has the potential to unleash violent technologies in the quest for ‘ethics’ and ‘morality.’ As George Herbert Mead pointed out many years ago, when community members unite against an outsider, they are bonded for an intense moment in a way that masks the very real problems that tear the community apart. The ironic twist is that ‘mob justice’ in Khayelitsha is also a mass technology to protect private property in the context of the endemic inequality that characterizes South Africa

This article explores the politics of punishment in contemporary Central Europe. Based on an analysis of penal policies and discourses in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, it examines how penal politics have taken shape in a region with direct experience with the abuses of penal confinement. On the one hand, it reveals how Central European politicians and state actors used tough, law and order rhetoric to reimagine the postsocialist community and to redraw the lines of social inclusion and exclusion, thus developing a uniquely East European penal nationalism that equates punitiveness with national sovereignty and protection. At the same time, the article argues that this penal nationalism emerged largely as a response to the dilemmas of democratization in the region—to the political challenges of forging new solidarities amid changing social boundaries and of state and political actors’ ongoing legitimacy crises. In this way, the article uncovers the layers of complexity that characterize the postsocialist world of punishment as well as the intersecting influences of past and present, of global and local, and of ideology and practice on those politics.

This article sets out to examine the degree to which democratic transition in Serbia after 2000 has brought about a democratic mode of crime governance in the country. It is shown that while penal norms and policies have undergone a significant degree of democratization in that their outlook has tended not to be punitive, the judiciary (and, to some degree, other actors in the penal field) has been increasingly inclined towards punitive practices. Taking an institutional approach to explain this discrepancy, the article argues that pockets of authoritarianism in the executive have survived the transition to democracy and have continued to exert pressure on the judiciary in ways that have influenced judicial decision-making towards greater punitiveness.