Neoliberal and Neoconservative Discourses on Crime and Punishment

Abstract

This essay will analyze the structure of contemporary criminological discourse by illustrating how such discourse breaks down into two complementary discursive strategies bound up by a complex dialectical relationship. It will analyze the different ways of thinking about the criminal question typical of late modern societies by describing on the one hand a criminological discourse calling for harsh and exemplary punishment, a discourse that informs to large extent the rhetoric of the neoconservative political movement, which in recent decades has established its hegemony over the public debate on crime and punishment; on the other hand a criminological discourse that typically informs what has been called advanced liberalism, more attuned to the way the problem of crime tends to be approached by technicians, administrators, and penologists, who are more concerned with the question of costs and rewards and are therefore careful to assess the costs that come with an expansion of the penal system. As much as these two strategies stand in contrast to each other in important ways, they nonetheless seem to function in a complementary fashion, considering that neo-conservatism may be thought as the political platform of economic neo-liberalism.