Beyond the Prison Gates

At the end of the nineteenth century, the jurist, legal reformer and founder of the innovative ‘Marburg School’ of criminal law, Franz von Liszt, declared that the ‘best criminal policy is social policy’. According to Warren Rosenblum, Liszt's observation has continued to inform German criminological practices since. In fact, contemporary Germany offers important insights into the treatment of criminals. The 2009 statistics of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, indicate that 9 out of every 10,000 Germans was imprisoned, in contrast to 76 Americans drawn from an identical sample. Moreover, in a twelve-month period over 2004/05, 13.1% of the German population reported experiencing a crime, as a victim or as a potential victim, while 21% of the UK population reported the same. It is against this backdrop that Rosenblum's masterful monograph stands. In Beyond the Prison Gates, Rosenblum argues that a ‘distinctively German’ approach to welfare policy, based on cooperation and competition ‘between private, mostly Christian charities and public welfare offices’, along with the claim of Weimar-era reformers that ‘true punishment is welfare work‘, has shaped that country's penal system, endowing it with an especially ‘mild’ and ‘social’ approach to the treatment of offenders which continues to the present (pp. 3, 4, 232).

Competition (biology) · Criminal law · Criminology · German · German population · Political science · Population · Prison · Punishment (psychology) · Social Welfare · Sociology · Welfare · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Criminal Law and Policy · Demography · History · Law · Psychology