WLS/CJC Staff Seminar:

After Punitiveness? Studying Leniency and Irrelevance

David Nelken, King's College London

Abstract:

One of the major- perhaps the principle -focus of recent work in comparative criminal justice research, in and beyond Europe, has been making sense of different levels of so-called 'punitiveness’. This is very much a continuing matter of debate (see e.g. Braghan, 2021; Drenkhahn, Jobard, and Singelnstein eds, 2023), as can be seen also in other chapters of this handbook. But it may be worth taking stock to consider whether it could be time to move on, and what this might entail. Without any pretensions to being exhaustive I will offer here some comments about how research in this field has evolved and could evolve. I shall first summarise some of the conceptual and methodological problems encountered in the punitiveness debate and then discuss the increasing tendency to write about leniency, moderateness, and forgiveness (both from an empirical and a normative perspective). As an illustration of the new issues this opens up, I shall finish with a brief examination of the supposed leniency of the Italian juvenile justice system. Is its leniency just the converse of punitiveness? In what ways does the system try to make punishment irrelevant?