When Children Kill ChildrenPenal Populism and Political Culture

Abstract

This title examines the role of political culture and penal populism in the response to the emotive subject of child-on-child homicide. The book explores the reasons underlying the vastly differing responses of the English and Norwegian criminal justice systems to the cases of James Bulger and Silje Redergård respectively. Whereas James Bulger's killers were subject to extreme press and public hostility, and held in secure detention for nine months before being tried in an adversarial court, and serving eight years in custody, Redergård's killers were shielded from public antagonism and carefully reintegrated into the local community. This book argues that the English adversarial political culture creates far more incentives to politicize high-profile crimes than the Norwegian consensus political culture. Drawing on a wealth of empirical research, the book suggests that the tendency for politicians to justify punitive responses to crime by invoking harsh political attitudes is based upon a flawed understanding of public opinion. In a compelling study, the book proposes that a more deliberative response to crime is possible by making English culture less adversarial and by making informed public judgment more assessable.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 156 citations exist upstream.