Inequality, welfare and punishment. Comparative notes between the Global North and South
| Author | Máximo Sozzo |
| DOI | 10.1177/14773708211060164 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Penal changes, crises, and the political economy of punishment |
Inequality, welfare and
punishment. Comparative
notes between the Global
North and South
Máximo Sozzo
National University of Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina
Abstract
In this paper, I will describe how two strong connections between, on the one hand, income
inequality and welfare generosity, and, on the other, punitiveness, have been built in both theor-
etical and empirical explorations in the contemporary comparative literature on the sociology
of punishment. Then, I will point out the strong concentration of these explorations on national
cases from the Global North as a potential limitation. From there, I will try to ‘southernize’this
debate, through three empirical exercises related to a region of the Global South, Latin America.
First, I will include this region in a global comparison of clusters of countries to define whether
there is an association between the levels of income inequality and welfare generosity and the
levels of punitiveness, both now and in the recent past. Second, I will analyse if the same relation-
ships exist within Latin America countries, both now and in the recent past. Finally, I will examine
whether these same relationships are relevant for understanding the evolution of the levels of
punitiveness in Latin America over the last three decades. Based on the results of these three
exercises, I will examine the shortcomings stemming from assuming these strong statements as
universal, placeless and timeless, warning that the styles of comparison that have generated
them have to be taken as starting points rather than as arrival points of the analysis and stressing
that our analyses about contemporary penal differences, while taking macroscopic dimensions into
account, should give a strong centrality to the ‘proximate’processes that mould penal actions and
results.
Keywords
Inequality, welfare, punishment +comparison, global nor th, global south
Corresponding author:
Máximo Sozzo, National University of Litoral, Candido Pujato 2751, Primer Piso, Santa Fe, CP 3000, Argentina.
Email: msozzo80@gmail.com
Special Issue: Penal changes, crises, and the political economy of punishment
European Journal of Criminology
2022, Vol. 19(3) 368–393
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14773708211060164
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Introduction
During the last two decades, interesting attempts have been developed in the sociology of
penality to reconstruct the links between macroscopic dimensions related to political
economy and legal punishment (Brandariz et al., 2018: 5–8). These forays have important
precedents, beginning with the pioneering work of Rusche and Kirchheimer (Brandariz,
2019: 19–38; De Giorgi, 2006: 3–9, 2013: 41–44; Garland, 1990: 83–110; Melossi,
2003), going through the revisionist historical research developed in the 1970s
(Brandariz, 2019: 40–49; De Giorgi, 2006: 9–19, 2013: 44–46), until the quantitative
sociological inquiries on the relationships between the labour market and incarceration
in advanced capitalist societies between the 1970s and 1990s (Brandariz, 2019: 50–81;
Chiricos and DeLone, 1992; De Giorgi, 2006: 19–39).
This last prolific vein of the literature on the political economy of punishment at the
end of the 20th century was founded on case studies and focused on a handful of specific
countries –among which the United States stood out (Brandariz, 2019: 59). Conversely,
and in part, as a critical reaction, the explorations of the last 20 years place a comparative
approach at the centre of the scene (Beckett and Western, 2001; Cavadino and Dignan,
2006, 2011, 2014; Downes and Hansen, 2006; Lacey et al., 2018; Lacey, 2008, 2010a,
2010b, 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2013; Lappi-Seppälä, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017; Sutton,
2000, 2004, 2013; see Brandariz, 2019: 129–166; Garland, 2017: 82–91; Nelken,
2010: 59–66; Sozzo, 2018a). These explorations have crucially affirmed the existence
of strong penal differences across contemporary societies, contrasting with other inter-
pretative frameworks about contemporary penality that have tended to emphasize hom-
ogenization and convergence through national and cultural borders (Sozzo, 2018a: 48–
49). In turn, these explorations seek to explain these penal differences in relation to
various key economic, but also cultural and political dimensions.
Although theseexplorations have an important degreeof theoretical and methodological
heterogeneity,here I am interested in rescuingand highlighting two specific commonargu-
ments that acquire the character of strong statements when thinking about penal variation
and its relationships with economic, culturaland political differences. On the one hand,the
idea that the levelsof social inequality –fundamentally in terms of income inequality –are
directly and positively related to the levels of punitiveness –measured fundamentally
through incarceration rates, the higher the level of inequality, the higher the level of puni-
tiveness and vice versa. On the other hand, the statement, strongly linked to the preceding
one, that the levels of welfare generosity, both in quantitative terms –volumes of social
spending –and in qualitative terms –universality as opposed to focalization and condition-
ality –are directly and negatively related to the levels of punitiveness, the greater the gen-
erosity of welfare,the lower the level of punitiveness and vice versa. These two arguments
are deployed in some cases to account for penal variation over time and, in other cases, to
account for penal variation across space.
In this work, I will describe how these two strong arguments have been built across
heterogeneous explorations in the contemporary literature on the sociology of punish-
ment. Then, I will point out the strong concentration of these explorations on national
cases from the Global North as a potential limitation and try to ‘southernize’this
debate. To do that I will present three empirical exercises related to a region of the
Sozzo 369
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