Penal changes, crises, and the political economy of punishment: An introduction1
| Author | Máximo Sozzo,José A. Brandariz |
| DOI | 10.1177/14773708221081021 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Penal changes, crises, and the political economy of punishment |
Penal changes, crises,
and the political economy
of punishment:
An introduction
1
José A. Brandariz
University of A Coruna, Spain
Máximo Sozzo
National University of Litoral, Argentina
Back at the turn of the century, various influential works warned against criminology
scholars’inclination to easily identify epochal changes in the field of crime and penality
(Garland, 2001; Hutchinson, 2006; O’Malley, 2000; O’Malley and Meyer, 2005; Sparks
and Loader, 2004). This caution against so-called “criminologies of catastrophe”was and
still is particularly pertinent. Academic communities should avoid falling into the fallacy
of constantly seeing penal changes as watershed shifts that completely mutate the con-
tours of penal policies and practices, thereby losing sight of the manifold continuities
from the past (Sozzo, 2018a, 2018b). In a Heraclitean fashion, though, criminology
debates should also not overlook the unstable and constantly changing nature of penal
arrangements (Goodman et al., 2015, 2017). This shifting penal terrain is theoretically chal-
lenging, since it requires specific efforts aimed at frequently updating analytical frameworks.
In partial contrast to the criminologies of catastrophe thesis, recurring updating tasks may have
much to gain from leveraging the notion of crisis. In fact, crises can be seen as turning points,
as privileged observation posts from which the potential obsolescence of a given theory can be
tested. As in Gramsci’s (1930/2011) concept of crisis, these turning points do not always lead
to the consolidation of a precisely defined, new configuration. Nonetheless, crises are uniquely
useful to revitalize academic approaches to a given phenomenon.
This special issue embraces the conception of crises as vantage points for exploration.
More precisely, it uses that lens to reflect on the political economy of punishment (here-
inafter, PEofP). That academic perspective particularly thrived in the 1970s and 1980s,
Corresponding author:
José A. Brandariz, Public Law, University of A Coruna, Facultade de Dereito, Campus de Elvina, s/n, A Coruna
15071, Spain.
Email: branda@udc.es
Special Issue: Penal changes, crises, and the political economy of punishment
European Journal of Criminology
2022, Vol. 19(3) 325–331
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14773708221081021
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