This study assesses and compares, in an Australian context, four explanations which have emerged to explain punitive attitudes. Each purports these attitudes have different origins: concerns over crime and a lack of trust in the state to deal with it ('crime-distrust' model); a desire to reinforce social cohesion or express discontent with society ('social discontent' model); an outlet for dissatisfaction over one's own life ('personal discontent' model); and a wish to suppress or express prejudice towards disliked racial minorities ('racial animus' model). The study finds support for each of the crime-distrust, social discontent and racial animus models (but not the personal discontent model). Despite rarely being considered in Australia, it also suggest that social discontent and racial animus may have as great, if not greater, an impact on punitiveness as concerns over crime and the state's response to it.

This article examines the effect of economic individualism -a belief that individuals can and should be responsible for their own economic welfare -on punitive attitudes in the English-speaking western world. Using existing survey data from the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand, the relationship between both normative and descriptive economic individualism and support for stiffer sentences and the death penalty is empirically assessed. Relatively consistently, a positive and significant relationship exists between both measures of economic individualism and both measures of punitiveness. This article suggests possible causal and non-causal reasons for this finding, as well as implications for future research.

Operating in Australia since 1999, drug courts are now present in the majority of Australian jurisdictions. This paper takes stock of the impact evaluations of Australia's drug courts to date, and considers to what extent these evaluations support drug courts as being more effective than 'conventional' sanctions in reducing recidivism. While Australian evaluations indicate drug courts reduce recidivism more than conventional sanctions, certainty in these findings is tempered by mixed results and methodological limitations.

Internationally, the 200 year honeymoon with the prison may be ending. Research showing that imprisonment is ineffective in reducing crime is finally being heeded by some conservative governments committed to cost cutting. But, as this case-study of Victoria, Australia, again highlights, punishment regimes are neither universal nor rational. Bucking the trend, prison numbers in Victoria have increased dramatically over the last decade and are set to rise higher. The lingering lure of the prison here, we argue, is a manifestation of Australia's colonial history in which punitiveness has always competed with pragmatic innovation. Although the research findings are inconclusive, we contend that Electronic Monitoring (EM), while differently fraught, better meets the key objectives of sentencing. Using a counterfactual social science thought experiment in the form of an imagined Cabinet submission, we show how political decision makers might be persuaded to effect a shift from prison to EM if it is framed within the competing visions of Australian national identity. We argue that understanding how social policy decisions are made sharpens the scholarly research agenda and also highlights how the convergence of a unique set of non-rational cultural assumptions can shape major shifts (or near misses) in the history of punishment in a particular society.

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