Penal Policy and the Social Democratic Image of Society

Abstract

For the last thirty years or so, many Western societies have been engaged in a programme of wide-ranging social and economic reconstruction. In this process, everything associated with the rise of the post-1945 welfare state has come to be discredited: the role of the state as the provider of welfare services has been undermined by privatisation; public expenditure has been cut; economies have been deregulated; and direct taxation has been lowered while indirect taxes have been raised. In such ways, modern societies have been reconstructed, as if the previous commitments to welfarism and the high levels of expenditure and taxation that were needed to pay for it had been some sort of ghastly aberration which, from the 1980s, political parties of both Right and Left - certainly in the Anglophone societies - have been keen to correct. By getting the state out of people’s lives, it has been claimed, entrepreneurial energy and dynamism would be freed up, bringing about much greater wealth creation as individuals took on more responsibility for the course of their lives. In an article titled Brick by Brick, We’re Tearing Down the Big State, British Prime Minister David Cameron has thus written that:

State bureaucracy has proved too clumsy and inefficient, stifling the innovation we need at a time when value for money is so critical. I also have an instinctive belief that parents, patients and professionals are so much better equipped to make the choices that will drive improvements in our public services. Give the power to them, allow new providers to come forward with new ideas, and good things will happen. (Daily Telegraph, 29 March 2012: 9)