Confronting the Criminology of Complacency: a rejoinder to some recent critiques of the 'punitive turn'

Simon Hallsworth and John Lea

December 2008

With the advent of mass incarceration in the US, rising prison populations in English speaking jurisdictions more generally, it appeared, to many of us writing within the terrain of penal theory that the state s appetite for pain delivery was on the increase. As these changes seemed to coincide with a more general crisis of the welfare state settlement, a number of questions posed themselves. What explained this punitive turn? Did it represent a new alternative to the older, rehabilitation focus of penal welfarism; and, most importantly, what are the social costs attached? Many have grappled with these questions and have brought a number of theoretical paradigms to bear in order to address them. John Pratt, for example, drawing on the work of Norbert Elias, sees such changes as indicative of de-civilizing processes at play in late modernity (Pratt, 2002, 2005). For Loic Wacquant, the advent of mass incarceration exemplifies a new way of governing poverty in post welfare state societies involving a deadly symbiosis between ghetto and penitentiary (Wacquant, 2004) For David Garland, punitive developments are to be understood, at least in part, as a volatile response by the state to the exposure of its limits by the arrival of perennially high crime societies (Garland, 1996, 2001) Other elaborations and theorisations of aspects of the punitive turn include contributions from the authors of the present paper (see Lea 2002, 2004, Hallsworth 2000, 2005).

While there is much that separates the various perspectives of contributors to the theme of the punitive turn, there is a tendency to agree on the following: (i) a punitive turn has occurred in the criminal justice systems of major jurisdictions in many advanced capitalist societies; (ii) it does appear to mark in crucial respects a rupture with the penal welfarism of earlier decades; (iii) it is to be understood in the context of wider changes in the socio-economic structure and political dynamics of the advanced capitalist societies associated with globalisation in particular the relative demise of the Keynesian welfare state and (iv) given the nature of this shift and the social costs attached, such developments are a cause for concern. While none of those who have attempted to theorise the punitive turn have argued that we are all punitive , or that the punitive is the only game in town , its presence marks a decisive shift in the orientation of criminal justice in the advanced capitalist societies. 

In a recent series of publications various aspects of punitive turn theory have been subject to sustained critique. Pat O'Malley began the process a few years ago with a broadside against what he called 'criminologies of catastrophe' (O'Malley 2000); a term embraced and applied by Steven Hutchinson in a more recent contribution (Hutchinson 2006). Others have joined the encounter. Lucia Zedner (2002) launched a sustained attack on the 'dystopia' of David Garland's version of the punitive turn (Garland 2001) More recently, Roger Matthews (2005) has criticised what he sees as the 'myth of punitiveness'. What unifies these different commentators, despite their differences, is that they reject the idea of a punitive turn and / or view recent developments in social control as largely benevolent or benign. It goes without saying that critique, even if polemical, is to be welcomed as an essential part of the process of theory development, In that spirit our response is in two parts. In this article we shall respond to the above-mentioned writers in regard to those aspects of their arguments of with which we most strongly disagree and, indeed, which seem to us to be characterised by undue complacency concerning recent penal developments. In a subsequent article we shall attempt a restatement and further elaboration of punitive turn theory.  

As with accounts of the punitive turn, the critiques are not necessarily all from the same theoretical or empirical standpoint. The authors mentioned above can be taken as exemplary of four distinct sets of arguments. The first, exemplified by O'Malley and Hutchinson, argues that punitive turn theorists are, by and large, chasing a chimera and that in reality traditional penal welfarism (to use David Garland's term) is alive and well and in no way displaced by a punitive turn. A second theme, specifically articulated by O'Malley, argues that criminal justice policies have always been 'volatile and contradictory' (O'Malley 1999) and that a diversity of recent developments can be identified which have little to do with any punitive turn arising from core changes to the structure of the advanced capitalist societies. For Zedner, by contrast, such core changes may well have taken place but have little to do with crime or criminal justice which is a relatively peripheral area in the overall scheme of things. Finally, Matthews directly challenges the social cost aspects of the punitive turn, seeing recent changes in crime control as 'emancipatory' rather than punitive. What unites these arguments is the assumption that the momentous and far reaching changes currently taking place on a global scale have had few consequences for crime and criminal justice. The latter continues to move serenely along as a relatively unchanged aspect of state activity, or if changing, then for the better. This is, in our opinion, the epitome of complacency.

Plus ca change

The first and perhaps most fundamental critique of the punitive turn is that it simply has not occurred. We can begin with critiques that wrongly formulate the original thesis in such a way that it is more easily refuted. Thus, according to Matthews (2005), for the punitive turn thesis to hold, there must be clear evidence of punitive intent. If this assumption is granted then of course it becomes possible for him to counter the thesis by arguing, for example, that prison expansion in the US can be better explained either by iatrogenic features integral to the operation of the criminal justice system (in this case the recirculation of penal subjects) or by push factors external to it (such as the imprisonment of people with mental health problems following the collapse of care in the community). As both these examples lack the required punitive intent, so the punitive turn thesis appears falsified. The problem here is that no version of the punitive turn thesis has ever relied on intentionality and why it should do so is unclear. It is quite probable to explain many of the punitive trends not as a direct attempt to induce more pain but as an unanticipated consequence of social actions which are not punitive but which nevertheless deliver punitive outcomes. Matthews argues, for example, that

 No punitive turn theorist would dispute this. The shift from social inclusion through welfare citizenship to social exclusion through criminalisation is precisely one of the key seismic shifts in the social policy of the advanced capitalist societies in recent decades and is one of the key factors driving the punitive turn. Rather confusingly, Matthews appears to criticise Loic Wacqant for elaborating just such a view of the advance of the prison in the US.

Other critics, however, do not see a need to rewrite the punitive turn thesis in order to demonstrate its falsity. The predominant form of counter-factual critique usually takes the form of a series of snapshots of aspects of current penal regimes: usually some mix of Canada, Australia, Scandinavia and the UK to show that penal welfarism is alive and well (see for example Penna and Yar, 2003 ). The implied assumption is that such case studies are falsifying instances as far as punitive turn theory is concerned. Thus for example, in a discussion of Canada, Meyer and O'Malley conclude that "Canadian criminal justice cannot be subsumed under a general model of a global punitive turn." (Meyer and O'Malley 2005: 213). The implication is that general theories of a punitive turn must be rejected. If such phenomena do exist then their explanation is contingent and localised.

One is reminded of Karl Popper's well known interpretation of scientific method for which, while theories can never be proved (it being impossible to observe all possible instances covered by a theory), they can certainly be falsified a single counter-factual instance contradicting the predictions of the theory being sufficient. (Popper, 1963) But then, as critics of Popper such as Thomas Kuhn observed, if science proceeded in accordance with this methodology then the only activity would be to abandon theories (Kuhn, 1962). Since all theories encounter at least some 'falsifying' instances, we would be left without any theories at all! In practice, as Kuhn observed, where much else sustains and is explained by the theory (in Kuhn's terms the overall 'paradigm' retains plausibility) then the 'falsifying instance' becomes regarded rather as a 'puzzle' needing further research and clarification. Further work on puzzles may in fact lead to an elaboration and consolidation of the basic paradigm rather than its abandonment. It is only when the paradigm faces so many 'puzzles' that it is overwhelmed by them, that the overall approach is rejected; but even here only when there is an alternative theorisation available with a plausible level of coherence and which can make more sense of the 'puzzles'. 

We find ourselves in something like this position with much of the 'it hasn't happened here' criticisms of the punitive turn. There is a certain negativity in the assumption that one instance of an apparent healthy penal welfarism is all that is necessary to consign punitive turn theory tout court to the dustbin and render further discussion unnecessary. Also into the dustbin by default goes the wider understanding of the dynamics of late modernity which lie behind the thesis of the punitive turn; there being no need for further discussion once the latter has been falsified. But as far as we are concerned the punitive turn coheres far more with current socio-economic changes in the advanced capitalist societies than does the generalised persistence of penal welfarism. The general downturn in the world economy, growing inequalities of income and wealth, geographical segregation of rich and poor, fragmentation of old class and community solidarities, increasing concern with security and the management of socially excluded populations seen as risk groups, the exhaustion of the Keynesian welfare state; all these developments point in the direction of a punitive turn as part of a more general drift to more authoritarian forms of governance.

Nevertheless, critique frequently takes the form of a simple snapshot purporting to demonstrate the continued dominance of penal welfarism in a particular country. There is no general attempt to show how the current socio-economic changes in the advanced capitalist societies mentioned above facilitate the survival of penal welfare or indeed to disprove the existence of those changes themselves. Maybe they do exist but they are only half the picture: maybe there are powerful counter-tendencies which sustain penal welfarism in the face of such changes? Maybe a punitive turn is only produced in certain circumstances or is one of a number of possible adaptations depending on the history of individual countries and political systems. Thus for example, the relationship between what Pratt (2000) calls 'ostentatious punishment' on the one hand and the rise of risk management (Feeley and Simon 1992) certainly needs further clarification. A simple notion of the 'punitive turn' with its admittedly rather narrow focus on punishment policy, certainly needs to be elaborated further, but this is quite different from simply abandoning it altogether just because, like any theory, it faces puzzles. Punitive turn theory does not insist that all regimes change at the same pace. All manner of resistances and survivals will be encountered. The point is either to understand them as precisely resistances (and for how long?) to general trends or to show that the punitive turn theorists have got their whole paradigm wrong. Only in the light of such a debate can we learn whether the 'puzzles' are a signal to abandon the whole project or in fact vehicles on which to elaborate it and make it more rounded and sophisticated. On this note, had Matthews been less insistent on theoretical demolition as his preferred mode of engagement, his meditation on the difference between punitive intentionally and punitive outcome would have provided new insights for just such an elaboration.

In fact, on closer inspection, several of the more sophisticated case studies contesting the idea of a new punitiveness already engage with these issues and reveal an awareness of tensions and counter-tendencies behind the survival of penal welfarism. This is true, for example, in the collection edited by Pratt et al. (2005) where Ulla Bondeson (2005), having documented the survival of Swedish penal welfarism, sees it as now swimming against the tide and identifies clear signs of an impending shift towards punitiveness. In the same volume David Nelken (2005) sees Italian culture and institutions particularly family and church as bulwarks against a punitive turn but notes that large scale immigration, much of it illegal, could well become the vehicle for a new punitiveness. In the Australian context David Brown (2005) argues that aboriginal people were always excluded from penal welfarism and that the seeds of a new punitiveness can perhaps be located in the extensions of penal control of immigrants and asylum seekers. 

Critics of the punitive turn thesis can of course use other ambiguities in a converse direction: to argue that apparent punitive shifts are in fact continuations of penal welfarism in another form. Thus Hutchinson (2006) uses recent work by Kelly Hannah-Moffat (2005) to argue that old rehabilitative structures have not disappeared but become "the site of new techniques and new practices." (Hutchinson 2006: 449) Hannah-Moffat argues that the apparent decline of penal welfarism in favour of risk management strategies ignores new hybrids of the two and what Garland and punitive turn theorists "fail to explore in sufficient detail is how risk strategies have evolved and how rehabilitation has been revived as a central feature of risk/need management and penal control." (Hannah-Moffat 2005: 30). She rejects any notion that rehabilitation has been displaced wholesale by the 'management in place' strategies first described by Feeley and Simon (1992). What has happened, she argues, is that the two have been amalgamated in the form of the orientation to the 'transformative risk subject' in which the aim of intervention is indeed to change/rehabilitate the offender but by modern methods associated with the identification and management of the offender's 'criminogenic needs' rather than older, welfarist-inspired rehabilitation strategies. But this is a long way from arguing nothing has changed. She is at pains to point out that the new rehabilitative strategies are not relics of penal welfare but are firmly oriented to removing individuals from risk of offending by teaching them to manage their criminogenic needs within the resources available such that, for example,

"in areas where unemployment is endemic, the payoff in identifying employment training among offender's needs may be smaller than in an area with extensive employment opportunities... This tautological, but pragmatic reasoning is different from past welfare enterprises that favoured more global interventions." (Hannah-Moffat 2005: 42-3)

Hutchinson, in seeming contradiction of his desire to go beyond 'criminologies of catastrophe', actually endorses this interpretation "For traditional rehabilitation, the state and its experts were responsible for success or failure. With risk/need approaches, the offender is responsibilised for their offending and their own treatment program." (Hutchinson 2006: 458) The idea that in a society of growing inequality and social exclusion such self-responsibilisation is not punitive is hardly credible. Nevertheless it points to directions in which punitive turn theory needs reformulation and elaboration. 

 There is no suggestion that Hannah-Moffat would identify herself with the punitive turn orientation but nevertheless she effectively shows that the 'new rehabilitationism' is not simply a return to, or continuation of, the old idea of reintegration into welfare citizenship. It is rather taking the management of risk groups by the 'warehousing' identified by Feeley and Simon, Wacquant and others a step further by teaching offenders to 'self-warehouse' through quietly managing their criminogenic needs without any implications for the distribution of welfare resources, public investment in employment and other macro issues which had such an irritating tendency to creep into traditional discourses of penal welfare. Moreover, when these tendencies, fairly general in Anglo-Saxon probation systems, are put in the context of the transformation of probation from social work with offenders to a punishment oriented 'offender management' system (Farrant 2006, Goodman 2003), the deskilling of probation officers into technicians under constant pressure to increase risk assessment scores (Fitzgibbon 2004, 2007) and the downgrading of 'rehabilitation' from the status of a right to that of one device among many for effective crime reduction (Lewis 2005), what at first sight constituted a 'puzzle' for punitive turn theory, starts to look like a confirming instance while at the same time necessitating a widening and further elaboration of the dimensions of punitiveness. 

 The recent work of Rene van Swaaningen (2007) also exemplifies the power of a more nuanced approach. He clearly documents what most would accept as one of the clearest and most decisive punitive shifts in recent years, the transformation of Dutch society from a liberal welfare state into a punishing state that has presided over a dramatic rise in its prison population. In so doing he does not attempt to suggest that the punitive turn is the only turn at play in Dutch society. His work shows how punitive developments occur but in conjunction with and by no means in contradiction to the kind of preventative turn identified by Hughes as another key feature of late modern societies (Hughes, 2007)  

autonomy and insignificance

  As far as critics of punitive turn theory are concerned, the question remains of how to relate to the general changes in the advanced capitalist societies noted above. Reference to an alternative general sociology or political economy which theorises an unbroken continuity with the heyday of the Keynesian welfare state is hard to find among the critics. Rather, they make recourse to what may be likened to a backwater thesis of criminal justice: that sees developments in crime control as more or less autonomous areas of governance disconnected from wider social changes and disarticulated from wider social structures.

One variant of such an approach can be found in Lucia Zedner's (2002) review of David Garland (2001). Garland, as a punitive turn theorist certainly made some attempt to ground the transition from penal welfare to what he called the crime control complex in more basic changes in the social structure of late modernity. For Zedner this is a mistake because of the peripheral nature of crime. Thus one can be agnostic concerning the existence of major changes in economy, social structure and modes of governance because such changes have little effect on the world of crime and its control. She quotes Downes and Morgan (1997) to the effect that it is only from the end of the 1970s that 'law and order' became, in the UK, a contested political issue whereas up to then it had been relatively depoliticised.

She argues that "techniques of crime control have become curiously disassociated from crime itself. The pursuit of 'security'... has become an end in itself whose success of failure is gauged by quite other criteria than crime rates." She then asks whether the emphasis on crime in recent years has served "as a diversion or smokescreen from other graver sources of social ill." (362) She refers to Richard Sennett (1998) and his demonstration that "one of the key sources of insecurity in late modern society is the growing 'flexibility' of employment practices." (362-3). It might be thought that given the associated fragmentation, isolation and insecurity induced by such flexibility, this might have had some effect on crime and responses to it. Indeed a major component of Garland's explanation of the punitive turn was the growing sense of insecurity among the middle classes posed by the advent of high crime societies and the inability of penal welfarism to confront it. But as Zedner has already criticised Garland for overstatement on this theme she could hardly embrace it herself. Rather she sidesteps the issue by marginalising it:

 It is surely unrealistic to imagine that the developments described by Sennett, by enhancing insecurity both of employment and social and personal life generally, do not impact on the fear of crime, the concentration of crime in various deprived communities and the forms of control which governments deploy. This is true even if there are other effects of greater magnitude. The idea that crime would retain the marginal and depoliticised status that it had in the 1950s as described by Downes and Morgan, were it not for irresponsible government induced moral panics is hardly credible. There is a failure to understand the degree to which, precisely because of the changes analysed by Sennett and many others, crime and insecurity have become central arenas through which large areas of social life are now lived and governed accordingly. Government policies have certainly reinforced this, but they have hardly created it out of thin air as some sort of diversion.

Zedner's failure to understand this dynamic is illustrated by her recourse to historical analogy. She quotes approvingly the legal historian John Langbein who, in 1983, in a polemical intervention (Langbein 1983), criticised historians like Edward Thompson, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and others for "overstating the importance of crime control to the social order. 'The criminal justice system', he argued, occupies a place not much more central than the garbage collection system.'... can Langbein's charge be levelled against contemporary penal theorists?" (Zender 2002: 362). To see crime control as analogous to garbage collection is perhaps an unfortunate metaphor both as regards implied attitudes to offenders and also in the context of current global problems of waste disposal. While she recognises the unfortunate nature of Langbein s metaphor in this respect it seems neverthelss to contradict her own view, quoted above, that the 'despoilment of the environment' is more important than crime.  

 In the polemic referred to by Zedner, Langbein expounded a completely ahistorical view of crime as an unchanging, asocial and always marginal phenomenon. He did this in the face of the painstaking research by Douglas Hay, Edward Thompson and their associates into the dynamics of class struggle in eighteenth century England which led them to develop a concept of 'social crime' to show precisely the opposite: that in the context of eighteenth century England crime, law and justice were major arenas for the emergence and clash of new social forces. (see Hay et al. 1975, Lea 1999) It is not without some irony that Pat O'Malley made an important Australian contribution to this theme (see, for example: Malley 1979, 1981). Zedner applies the Langbein methodology and argues that to understand present social dynamics it would be better to read Sennett. But if the dynamics described by Sennett are true then it is unlikely that they fail to manifest themselves in the area of crime. Hay and Thompson et al. showed how in eighteenth century England 'social crime' became a terrain of incipient class struggle prior to the formation of class politics, organisation and consciousness. As industrial capitalism developed, with class politics, political representation, rising incomes and, finally, the welfare state, crime did indeed eventually become more of a peripheral and marginal issue as described by Downes and Morgan. But in the present period we face the mirror image of the situation analysed by Thompson. Crime has come to colonize many areas of social life, from business to entertainment, personal identity and culture (see Young, 1999; Hayward, 2004). There has been a process of

A second variant of the autonomy thesis is expounded by O'Malley (1999). In a similar way to Zedner he sees crime and its control as peripheral issues, a "side-show in a far bigger restructuring of governance" (1999: 182) This 'restructuring of governance' currently taking place does not appear to be related to general changes of the type analysed by Sennett and at least noted by Zedner even if, for her, they have little impact on crime. It rather seems to have an autonomy all of its own and is due to a certain volatility in the sphere of politics and the state which does not appear to be related to wider issues of socio-economic change. The current period is seen as characterised by an unstable alliance between two ideologies or 'paradigms of government': namely, neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. The former stresses authority, discipline and retributivism, the latter privatisation, autonomy, self-government by individuals and communities. The strong point of this argument is that this enables Malley to take on board a plurality of developments including more punitive ones but also reintegrative strategies such as restorative justice which punitive turn theorists have tended to ignore (a point also made by Hutchinson 2006). But the emergence of such measures is apparently to be explained purely by reference to these conflicting government paradigms and not any wider structural changes.  

The basic problem is that in order to insulate the various contradictory changes in penality, which he identifies as underway, from any contact with forces such as postmodernity or the dynamics of global capitalism, O'Malley is forced to refer only to ideologies or paradigms of government which have been around and in uneasy 'volatile and contradictory' alliance since the dawn of industrialisation. Indeed penal welfare was itself one version of the alliance between liberal and conservative ideas: that a patrician elite would supervise the humane rehabilitation and socialisation of the lower orders, including criminal offenders, into a welfare state citizenship which would enable them to become autonomous self-acting citizens and communities. What needs to be emphasised is that the re-emergence of liberalism and conservatism in their 'neo' variants comes about under conditions of the crisis and breakdown of the consensus around penal welfare. It is implausible to deny the roots of this breakdown in the impact of globalisation and concomitant socio-economic changes in the advanced capitalist countries mentioned above. The 'changing paradigms of government' are precisely a reflection of these changes and the attempts of political elites to come to terms with them: hence their 'volatile and contradictory' nature.

   Roger Matthews (2002) develops another version of the backwater thesis in his own critique of David Garland. Crime is neither peripheral garbage collection nor are the politics of crime control played out in some insulated governmental stratosphere, but rather, crime control has lost its distinct identity and "become enmeshed within a wider framework of community safety which incorporates issues of health, transport, the environment and housing. In this process crime is in danger of losing its prominence and becomes one of a number of 'hazards' which have to be dealt with." (2002: 224) We are thus "witnessing a de-centring of crime control and moving towards the development of mechanisms for the management of the socially excluded and the 'underclass and other problem groups often with reference to notions of 'risk' and 'dangerousness'." (2002: 224-5)

There is, in fact, not much to disagree with here. But the argument is tangential to the question of the punitive turn. The fact that crime has become part of a wider continuum of anti-social behaviour and crime control 'enmeshed within a wider framework' involving a plurality of agencies, may be precisely one of the ways in which crime control comes to exert a decisive influence on the working of other agencies. Crime appears to be 'one harm among many' precisely because so many other forms of sub-criminal harm have been effectively criminalised through various strategies of pre-emptive criminalisation. (Lea 2002) This has been particularly marked in areas like mental health (Fitzgibbon 2004, 2007) and in measures (in the UK) such as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) (Squires and Stephen 2005, Wain and Burney 2007) or Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) imposed on the basis of risk assessments (Rose 2007). Crime is subsumed into a wider theme of 'security' and 'protection of the public' which has become the driving force for a progressive criminalisation of social policy in general (Coleman, 2004). Community safety, far from being a different kind of process to crime has become instead dominated by conventional orientations to criminality and crime control (Crawford 2006). Meanwhile, the core criminal justice system (and the centrality of the prison) goes from strength to strength in terms of expanding prison populations. Matthews' (correct) identification of the growth of a diversity of responses to crime is, in our opinion, more a signal to expand and elaborate the dimensions of the punitive turn than to regard it as falsified by events.

emancipation   

An important theme in the criticism of punitive turn theory is that even if true it is not the only game in town. Indeed it is theoretically possible to concede an element of truth to the punitive turn thesis in the area of penal policy but argue that it is counterbalanced by other developments of an anti-punitive nature. This is what O'Malley has in mind in his reference to the volatile and contradictory nature of penal politics. Prison expansion has been accompanied by the growth of non-punitive systems such as restorative justice. We cannot do justice to the causes and effectiveness of such innovations here save to say that their emergence in no way invalidates punitiveness as the predominant tendency. It can, however, be observed that insofar as they attempt to establish a new relationship between offenders, victims and communities their effectiveness is restricted to certain types of crime and to communities with sufficient cohesion to sustain such interaction. Indeed, serious questions can be raised as to whether free market societies committed to exclusionary policies are capable of creating let alone sustaining a community into which the excluded and marginalised can be included or restored to. As Barbara Hudson remarked, the "weakest point of many of the restorative justice formulations, is thus & what is the community; what is community interest and how can it be represented?" (Hudson 1998: 251) Or as John Braithwaite put it "Restorative justice founders when the welfare state is not there to support it." (Braithwaite 2000: 233)

So it is likely that the very socio-economic forces which have undermined penal welfarism and laid the ground for the punitive turn hinder rather than facilitate the development of seemingly more benevolent innovations such as restorative justice. In the absence of substantial long term programmes of economic and social renewal of these areas in short, a return to the Keynesian welfare state these hindering factors are likely to intensify and the results can indeed be described as catastrophic. Hutchinson (2006), in confronting catastrophe criminology with rays of sunshine fails to consider these issues. Thus his mention of therapeutic drug courts as yet another falsification of the punitive turn ignores the fact that these, although not directly punitive, pay little respect for the human rights of those processed through them. Nor are these courts an alternative to the wider war on drugs perpetrated to such disastrous effect by the US, it is another front in its development.

 It is one thing to argue that the punitive turn has been (partially) negated by the growth of non-punitive developments: it is another to argue the progressive nature of the punitive developments themselves. Such developments are rarely presented politically as such, being seen rather as rational solutions to social problems. It is their unintended consequences that are important. Matthews, in his critique of Garland, argues, however, that the very distinction between liberty and regulation is now outdated and that   

On one level this seems simply a roundabout way of making the uncontroversial point that some sections of the population benefit from measures which prove punitive. The victim benefits from the incarceration of the offender; local residents benefit from the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders which keep threatening youth gangs and drug dealers out of the area. Thus Matthews criticises Garland for having made:

This could be read as a call to criminologists to rally behind the criminal justice system or at least the 'what works' agenda and that efforts to manage crime and risk should be supported irrespective of how punitive, invasive or contrary to due process they may be. The thinking behind this approach appears to be if re innocent ve nothing to fear. There is undoubtedly an increased public demand for security, though whether the demand is congruent with the threat is a debatable issue. But, notwithstanding the fact that governments in democracies need to present themselves as responding to public demand in new ways, it does not follow that the measures enacted actually are 'empowering and emancipatory'. Community safety, for example, may signify a concern for public wellbeing but as studies show, (Coleman, 2004; Coleman and Sim, 2000; Hancock, 2003, Crawford 2006) the practices associated with, or which stem from it, work with a highly attenuated notion of the public and its needs. 

Matthews (2002) mentions areas such as sexual assault and racial attacks where more punitive measures and alterations to criminal procedure do seem obviously to benefit victims of crime. But most IPPs for example are imposed on burglars and street robbers (Rose 2007) and there is growing evidence of cases where ASBOs have intensified rather than reduced the factors driving young people towards criminal lifestyles (Wain and Burney 2007). Part of the problem is identified by Matthews himself as the merging of crime into a wider spectrum of harms and problems. Under such circumstances criminal justice constraints inevitably take on a scatter-gun character and effectively criminalise those who have yet to enter serious criminality. The result is that of more and more offenders& getting mired deeper and deeper within the criminal justice system for doing less and less. (Morgan, 2003: 14) Including, it could be added, populations which, until recently, were once considered vulnerable and in need of support such as sex workers and street drinkers both of whom may now find themselves subject to highly punitive anti social behaviour orders. Despite the celebration of the growth of restorative justice by the authors under consideration here, this remains the predominant trend.

But then can we really be surprised that in class divided, fragmented and highly unequal societies, all sorts of contradictory pressures come into play. Measures which appear to benefit one group, middle class consumers and shoppers for example, may well oppress others; in this case the undesirable street occupiers such as beggars, public drinkers, and young people hanging around who offend them. Thus Matthews (2002) seems to hedge his bets. Improvements have only been for 'some people' and 'at a price'. What we need to establish is which people and at what price. These are precisely the issues which are the focus of the debate about the new punitiveness! ASBOs and Dispersion Zones may certainly make some people feel safer and may reduce their fear of victimisation. But they may simultaneously oppress and make more hazardous the lives of many more poorer and socially marginalised people such as the beggars, sex workers street drinkers, the homeless and so on. In other words yes, crime control is emancipatory for the powerful just as it always has been. For the poor and marginalized suspect communities , it is a different story.