An introduction: Fifty years later,Punishment and Social Structure in comparative analysis

Did Falling Wages and Employment Increase U.S. Imprisonment?

“…Hale 1982), race and ethnicity (Hall 1978), or some combination of the two (Melossi 1989;Spohn and Halleran 2000). If not through crime, how do marginal populations endanger social order?…”

Social context of crime control: a time-series analysis of the Korean case, 1973–2002

“…While earlier studies of conventional conflict theorists provide deterministic predictions of a direct link between economic conditions and crime control, more recent studies have concentrated their focus on the mediating process that links the economy to crime control [1,5,16,28,37,45,69]. Unlike general predictions from the conflict perspective, economic deprivation may be associated with crime control only under certain circumstances.…”

“…In other words, when economic inequality is regarded as threatening, a punitive rhetoric or discourse is likely created and harsher crime control results. In contrast, when economic inequality is not perceived as threatening, there is no need to create a punitive rhetoric of crime control and, in turn, harsher crime control is unnecessary [5,10,28,44,45]. Economic inequality, for example, produces the perception of insecurity, which in turn creates 'fear of crime' not only among the economically dominant groups, but also among the public assisted by media amplification of the seriousness of the crime problem.…”

“…This apparent lack of consistency inevitably leads one to wonder why it is so. 2 "A punitive vocabulary of motives" [45] and "discourse of moral panics" [5,16] were said to mediate the process under which economic changes are linked to the production of more punitive crime control. linked to harsher punishment is identified, however, the link between the economy and punishment may be "elusive" and "coincident" [28,45].…”

“…Therefore, integration of these three contexts into a single project will provide a better explanation of crime control practices. Second, in terms of methodology, most studies also suffer from overgeneralization in that they examine only one of several possible crime control practices (e.g., arrest, prosecution, conviction, or incarceration) and generalize the findings to overall crime control activities [34,45,59,69]. However, the criminal justice system consists of interdependent but relatively autonomous sub-units.…”