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Why Aren't German Penal Policies Harsher and Imprisonment Rates Higher?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Michael Tonry

Extract

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It is common for reformist academics, human rights advocates, and political liberals to bemoan harsher public attitudes towards crime and criminals, populist posturing by politicians, and more repressive penal policies. Some years ago, sociologist David Garland, a leading scholar of this subject, described increasingly repressive strategies of crime control in contemporary Britain, Australia, and the United States, ‘and elsewhere, too'. Some years later Hans-Jörg Albrecht called Garland to task for that ‘and elsewhere, too,’ noting that what happens in English-speaking countries does not inexorably happen elsewhere and that penal policies in many Western countries were not becoming more repressive or more politicised in parallel with American and British developments.

Type
Public Law
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 10 , 01 October 2004 , pp. 1187 - 1206
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Garland, ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society', in 36 British Journal of Criminology (1996), p. 445–71.Google Scholar

2 Albrecht, Hans-Jörg, ‘Post-Adjudication Dispositions in Comparative Perspective’ in Sentencing and Sanctions in Western Countries, (Michael Tonry/Richard S. Frase, eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 294.Google Scholar

3 e.g. Tonry, ed., Penal Reform in Overcrowded Times, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Tonry/Frase, eds., Sentencing and Sanctions in Western Countries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Whitman, James Q, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between American and Europe, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar

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