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Book Review: Nicola Lacey

The punitive turn which in the last three decades reshaped the penal landscape of the United States seems to have produced at least one positive result: the reemergence of ‘grand’ narratives of social and penal control. After a long season of ideological disillusionment and theoretical cynicism, punctuated at best by leftist or right-wing variations on the theme of ‘criminological realism’, the onset of the new millennium witnessed a significant shift toward critical social theory in the field of punishment and society. Inspired mainly by the American penal experiment, along with a perceived need to investigate its potential expansion to other areas of the western world undergoing comparable socio-economic transformations (capitalist globalization, welfare crisis, post-industrialization, transnational migrations and so on), these narratives offer powerful descriptions of an emerging ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001), of a new paradigm of ‘governing through crime’ (Simon, 2007), of the construction of a more and more ‘exclusive society’ (Young, 1999), just to mention some of the most popular ones. In her latest book The Prisoners’ Dilemma Nicola Lacey argues that although long overdue, to some extent this return of broad theoretical critiques of punishment seems to have taken place at the expense of an equally important component of sociological work: comparative analysis. In essence, as a consequence of what the author sees as an unwarranted tendency to over-generalize the fin de siècle consolidation of mass-imprisonment and penal populism in the USA, these narratives of the penal question in the ‘late modernity’ would fail to address some simple and yet crucial questions. Is this inevitable? Are all ‘late modern’ societies doomed to follow the same path toward the construction of a ‘penal state’? Is penal excess an inevitable corollary of the advent of neoliberalism, the fragmentation of national labor markets and the ensuing widespread sense of ontological insecurity affecting most western societies? Situating her reflections along the coordinates of a liberal-democratic critique of punishment, Lacey’s answer is negative: