Confronting Penal Excess: Retribution and the Politics of Penal Minimalism

This monograph considers the correlation between the relative success of retributive penal policies in English-speaking liberal democracies since the 1970s, and the practical evidence of increasingly excessive reliance on the penal State in those jurisdictions.

It sets out three key arguments. First, that increasingly excessive conditions in England and Wales over the last three decades represent a failure of retributive theory. Second, that the penal minimalist cause cannot do without retri...