The Politics of Punishment

Résumé du livre

 This re-issue with a new Preface of a classic work by John Hostettler looks at the political and other social dynamics behind law, order and punishment. A timeless work by one of the UK’s leading commentators and now with pointers to key developments in penal politics of the last 20 years. This first paperback version contains a wide-ranging analysis of the topic from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, including: the impact on punishments of power struggles, wealth, superstition, class distinctions, populist ideas, the centrality for many years of the death penalty, modern-day ideas of rehabilitation but above all the underlying threads of social control, law and order and political signals about crime.

A classic work and a collector’s item which looks at the genesis and purposes of punishment. Shows how punishment, power differences, social control and (sometimes suspect) economics and politics have always been intertwined. A must for practitioners and students in this field.

‘Starts with a delightful description of Anglo-Saxon criminal law and punishment, and travels fast forwards…A colourful entertainment’—Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health.
‘Well researched, knowledgeable…a good read’—Litigation.
‘First class reading’—Police Journal.
‘Takes us on a breathless tour d’horizon of the history of judicial punishment, a thousand years in a hundred pages, before slowing down to examine more closely the reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’—The Magistrate