Tracing the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment: space, time and politics

The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty's focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities. Contributors: Vanessa Barker / Stockholm University, Sweden Leonidas Cheliotis / London School of Economics and Political Science Stephen Farrall / University of Derby Emily Gray / University of Derby Zelia Gallo / King’s College London David Garland / New York University, USA Marie Gottschalk / University of Pennsylvania, USA Susanne Karstedt / Griffith University, Australia Manuel Iturralde / Universidad de los Andes, Colombia Philip Mike Jones / University of Derby Nicola Lacey / London School of Economics Dario Melossi / University of Bologna, Italy Lisa L. Miller / Rutgers University, USA Catherine Sirois / Stanford University, USA David Soskice / London School of Economics Bruce Western / Columbia University, USA Sappho Xenakis / Birkbeck, University of London Lucia Zedner / All Souls College, University of Oxford