Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice

Exploring US Influence over British Crime Control Policy

Bibliographic Data

ID8400547
AuthorsJonathan Simon (0000-0002-3622-3842, University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume48
Issue2
Pages251-254
Publication date2007-12-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe British Journal of Criminology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-0955 • E-ISSN: 1464-3529
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/bjc/azn006
OpenAlexW2069564157
LanguageEN
Citations received38
References cited2

Policy Transfer offers a new and vital addition to the growing body of work on the punitive turn in criminal justice policy in the advanced industrialized societies and, in particular, the United States. Hitherto, much of this work has either focused on the United States alone (e.g. Mauer 1999; Simon 2007) or looked at the issue as one of global neo-liberalism, of which the United States is only the most extreme example (Cavadino and Dignan 2006). Jones and Newburn focus on two countries that share language and history, as well as proximity in their embrace of neo-liberal governmental strategies: the United States and the United Kingdom. In this respect, they follow the lead of David Garland's (2001) study of what he called the ‘culture of control’. But, unlike Garland, who anchored his explanation of punitiveness in a common cultural experience of ‘high crime’ societies, Jones and Newburn focus on the role of actors, institutions and agency generally, in the flow of crime-control policies from the United States to the United Kingdom. They do not reject the thesis that there may be a common cultural experience behind these trends (indeed, their findings tend to confirm that in part), but they attempt to empirically test how much of proximity in US and UK policies can be explained by intentional efforts to spread or follow the US model. In this respect, they are quite consistent with Garland's more recent argument that differences between Europe and the United States may reflect agency and institutions more than deep cultural differences (Garland 2004).

Agency (philosophy) · Argument (complex analysis) · Crime control · Criminal justice · Criminology · Policy transfer · Political economy · Political science · Punitive damages · Social science · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Policy Transfer and Learning · Public Administration

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