Liberty, equality and justice: democratic culture and punishment

Abstract

Convergence and divergence: criminal punishment in contemporary democracies Presently, imprisonment rates in the oldest of modern democracies, the United States are at historically high levels, and by far exceed those in other democracies. Imprisonment rates in the USA are affecting the social fabric of neighbourhoods and communities, and even impact on democratic elections in a way that changes their results (Manza and Uggen 2006). Even if this has often been seen as a case of ‘American exceptionalism’, as the exceptional scope and velocity of the increase of imprisonment rates in the USA was not matched in other Western democracies, it raises the question whether democratic societies are particularly susceptible to ‘penal excess’, which might endanger the very mechanisms of rule, law and justice on which democracies are founded. The exceptional rise of imprisonment rates in the USA took place against the backdrop of a less distinct increase in Canada (Webster and Doob in this volume; Tonry 2004), and most Western as well as Eastern European countries. The trend toward decreasing imprisonment rates that had defined the early decades of the second half of the twentieth century was reversed latest in the 1980s (see Tonry 2004; Tonry and Farrington 2005; Lacey 2008; Lappi-Seppälä 2008).

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