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Alternatives to Punishment — The Abolitionist Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2016

Steinert ,
Hulsman  and
Stanley Cohen
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Extract

Heinz Steinert and Louk Hulsman represent “abolitionism” — a stream of critical thinking about criminology, crime, criminal law and punishment that has been developing in Western Europe (mainly Holland, Germany, Austria and Norway) over the past two decades. Given that the participants to this Conference are mainly Anglo-American and Israeli academics or lawyers who have been quite insulated from this intellectual movement, it seemed to me that my most useful task as commentator would be to place these ideas in their wider intellectual context. After this, I will select a few general themes from these papers and compare them to the papers by Abel and Galanter in the related session on “Alternatives to Punishment”.

My own position towards abolitionism is that of a sympathetic, but critical fellow traveller: I agree with much, want to believe more but am skeptical about some.

Type
Alternatives to Punishment
Information
Israel Law Review , Volume 25 , Issue 3-4 , Summer–Autumn 1991 , pp. 729 - 739
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1991

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References

1 Steinert, Heinz, “Is There Justice? No — Just Us”, in this issue, at p. 710Google Scholar.

2 Hulsman, Louk, “The Abolitionist Case: Alternative Crime Policies”, in this issue, at p. 681Google Scholar.

3 Abel, Richard, “The Failure of Punishment as Social Control”, in this issue, at p. 740Google Scholar.

4 Galanter, Marc, “Punishment: Civil Style”, in this issue, at p. 759Google Scholar.

5 I provide this in Visions of Social Control (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Against Criminology (New Jersey, Transaction, 1988)Google Scholar.

6 In addition to Hulsman's and Steinert's papers at this Conference, I draw here on other writings by them and other European abolitionists (Christie, Bianchi, Mathieseh, Scheerer et al). For an introduction to this literature, see the Special Issue (1986) 10 Contemporary Crises: Law, Crime and Social PolicyGoogle Scholar.

7 See Shearing, C. D. and Stenning, P. L., eds., Private Policing (Beverly Hills, Sage, 1987)Google Scholar.

8 Christie, N., Limits to Pain (Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1982)Google Scholar.

9 de Haan, W., The Politics of Redress: Crime, Punishment and Penal Abolition (London, Unwin Hyman, 1990)Google Scholar.