John Pratt and Anna Eriksson, Contrasts in Punishment: An Explanation of Anglophone Excess and Nordic Exceptionalism
| Author | James Oleson |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865813504524 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
John Pratt and Anna Eriksson, Contrasts in Punishment: An Explanation of Anglophone Excess and Nordic
Exceptionalism. Routledge: New York, 2013; xii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780415524735, £90.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: James Oleson, University of Auckland, New Zealand
With Contrasts in Punishment, John Pratt and Anna Eriksson have provided penologists,
policy makers, and interested citizens with an important book. As mass incarceration
(in the US and elsewhere) begins to collapse under its own financial weight, a greater
understanding is sorely needed of why some nations seem to imprison large swaths of
their population with harsh and extensive sentences while other countries appear to use
imprisonment sparingly and beneficently. Building upon an influential series of John
Pratt’s articles and drawing upon Anna Erikkson’s capabilities as both translator and
international criminologist, Contrasts in Punishment sheds a much-needed light upon this
urgent issue of public policy.
In its extensive body of endnotes, the book quotes three well-known thinkers
(p. 210, n4) to support the proposition that the prison operates as a lens through
which we can understand the deeper workings of society:
.Fyodor Dostoevsky: ‘The standards of a nation’s civilization can be judged by open-
ing the doors of its prisons’.
.Winston Churchill: ‘The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of
crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country’.
.Nelson Mandela: ‘It is said that no-one truly knows a nation until one has been inside
its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its
lowest ones’.
Pratt and Eriksson demonstrate the veracity of these observations by comparing two
distinct clusters of nations: an Anglophone group (consisting of England, NSW
Australia, and New Zealand) and a Nordic group (consisting of Finland, Norway,
and Sweden). They note that the Nordic countries, with lower per capita rates of impris-
onment, enjoy a tradition of egalitarianism, moderation, and social inclusion, while the
Anglophone countries, emphasizing individual achievement, social division, and social
exclusion, have much higher rates of imprisonment. They set out to demonstrate that
state reliance upon imprisonment is a function of larger, deeper social arrangements
traceable to the early nineteenth century.
Their book is organized into an introduction and six numbered chapters that build
incrementally. The brief introduction contrasts a New Zealand prison (constructed out
of shipping containers, as a low-cost solution to overcrowding) with Norway’s Halden
Prison (the so-called most humane prison in the world), and justifies the selection of the
six nations included in the study. Chapter 1 compares aspects of prison operations (e.g.
prison size, quality of prison life, and characteristics of prison officers) in the two clusters
and lays out the structure of the remainder of the book. Then, going back to the 19th
century and drawing upon a range of sources, chapter 2 examines the social forces that
have produced cultural differences between Anglophone and Nordic countries. Chapter
3 examines the interaction of these social forces and the 20th century welfare state (which
harmonized in Nordic countries but produced a tension in Anglophone countries).
Chapter 4 examines modern penal arrangements (manifested in the early adoption of
450 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 46(3)
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