Developments in Penal Policy during the 1980s

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1980s, crime and criminal justice were widely held to be in crisis — crisis of dramatic and urgent dimensions in the USA and England and Wales, and crisis to a somewhat lesser extent in other Western countries. This crisis was many faceted: crime rates were rising, imprisonment rates were rising, policy responses were unclear and inadequate, public anxiety and media attention were aroused to a degree uncomfortable and unaccustomed for politicians and criminal justice professionals (Bottomley and Coleman, 1980). The crisis was thus variously described as a crisis of management, a crisis of legitimation, and a crisis of effectiveness (Matthews, 1988, p. 4). Furthermore, things looked set to get worse rather than better, with consequential rises in prison overcrowding, soaring public expenditure, and further loss of public confidence (Bottoms and Preston, 1980). It looked intractable: just as the problem of rising crime had not been solved by the expansionary, social-democratic social policies of the 1950s and 1960s (Taylor, 1981), and the problem of rising interventiveness and extensiveness of punishments had not been solved by the liberal-democratic penal policies of the 1960s and 1970s (Austin and Krisberg, 1981; Cohen, 1985; Thorpe et al., 1980) so it seemed that prison populations were not falling in response to the reductionist, liberal-conservative fiscal and social policies of the late 1970s and 1980s (Scull, 1984). Rather than a reduced criminal justice system ambit, what seemed to happen was that the penal net widened, strengthened and tightened as the social welfare net narrowed and loosened, that rather than witnessing decarceration we were seeing ‘transcarceration’ (Lowman, Menzies and Palys, 1987), manifest particularly in the apparent transfer of the mentally disordered from hospitals to prisons, and of young people from children’s homes to penal establishments.