The Political Economy of Punishment, Fifty Years On

• In Event: Is there a future for the political economy of punishment? Theoretical balance and perspectives

Abstract

Fifty years ago, the re-edition of Rusche and Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure gave a decisive impetus to an academic endeavour that has aimed to examine penality from a political-economic perspective. This analytical framework has significantly shifted over these last five decades. The 1970s and 1980s studies focusing on the correlation between unemployment rates and incarceration rates gave way to a wider sociological literature on punishment and social exclusion and to the neoliberal penality analyses and the variation of capitalism research of the 2000s and early 2010s. All throughout this evolution, the PEofP literature has taken increasing distance from the ‘economism’ criticisms which were raised in relation to Rusche and Kirchheimer’s seminal book. In doing so, this literature dealt with the ‘prison boom’ witnessed in many jurisdictions since the mid-1970s. This paper aims at examining whether this increasingly complex and multi-faceted PEofP scholarship is still relevant to account for twenty-fist century penal changes. More precisely, it endeavours to scrutinise whether the political-economic viewpoints embraced to explicate rising incarceration rates can still account for the current prison decline.

Author

• Jose A. Brandariz, University of A Coruna, Spain