The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith’s illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view

Democracy in America: An Appreciation On the Occasion of the Centennial of Tocqueville's Death

Age and Crime.

Wilhelm Hennis has written a book that is first and foremost a caveat as impassioned as it is well-documented and logical. The former characteristic may seem to contradict the latter. However, it is one of the author's considerable merits that he contrives to make them co-exist. From his foreword on, Hennis warns the reader against an intellectually improper strategy which he argues is being mounted quite openly the massive takeover of Max Weber, which is as swift and greedy as it is irresponsibly careless of the author's deepest original intention. It should not thus surprise us that the book brings to mind the warning call of a conscientious inspector of the ministry of Fine Arts, roused by the unscrupulous tomb-robbers smashing and looting Etruscan necropolises by night. The comparison is not too far-fetched. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with current sociological 'production' will quickly see that the immense and apparently unsystematic output of Max Weber is cheerfully appropriated and decanted, as it were, by means of lifting it out of context. Whole propositions, concepts and standpoints are purloined for current studies in sociology, not unlike the way the first Christians behaved in constructing their basilicas with the aid of the pagan temples of classical antiquity. Hennis especially deplored the fact that this use of Weber is at once now universally practised and wholly unmindful, indeed, alien, to the author's basic intention. In the early 1960's, when I was writing Max Weber e il destino della ragione (Laterza, Bari 1964 English ed., Sharpe, N.Y. 1980), I discovered the Erfurt sociologist had been more or less crudely 'embalmed'. Wilhelm Hennis fiercely supports this same point of view in the present work. However, whereas I confined myself to attributing this sterilizing and embalming to a more or less conscious plan, under the 'systematic' attentions of Talcott Parsons and other North American sociologists

On Max Weber

Criminological literature of the last decade is rife with tales and analyses of ‘increased’ or ‘new’ punitiveness in western countries over the last 20 or 30 years. This article starts from the fin...

Resisting punitiveness in Europe

Belgian imprisonment rates increased from sixty‐five to ninety‐five per 100,000 population in the past quarter century, and the use of pretrial detention and long prison sentences increased. Notorious crimes, most prominently the Dutroux case, produced mass demonstrations, and a right‐wing political party repeatedly urged harsher policies. In contrast to the United States and England, however, and although criminal justice policy became more politicized, Belgium did not adopt primarily expressive crime policies. Instead, a process of bifurcation resulted in expansion of prosecutorial diversions, prison alternatives, mediation, and restorative justice initiatives for less serious offenses and longer sentences for the most serious offenses. The main political parties continued to adopt pragmatic positions and balanced policies. Belgian policy makers continued to rely on expert advice, the emergence of a victims movement did not polarize the politics of crime control, and the influence of the human ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1086/592805

Penal Policy and Practice in Belgium

Official discourse in many European countries advocates the use of imprisonment as a measure of last resort. This principle is also at the core of several Recommendations of the Council of Europe and a Resolution of the European Parliament. In practice, detention rates in European countries vary greatly, and many countries have witnessed an increase in their prison population. This article argues that the application of deprivation of liberty raises in itself a human rights issue, and considers the support that European human rights instruments give to a reductionist penal policy. It concludes by defending a normative argument in favour of rethinking the principle of proportionality in its application to imprisonment.

A Reductionist Penal Policy and European Human Rights Standards

1. Resisting Punitiveness in Europe? An Introduction, Sonja Snacken and Els Dumortier 2. Political Economy, Welfare and Punishment in Comparative Perspective, David Downes 3. Explaining National Differences in the Use of Imprisonment, Tapio Lappi-Seppala 4. The Scandinavian Path to Welfare, Stein Kuhnle 5. Penalisation and Social Policies, Philippe Mary and Jacky Nagels 6. The Rise of the Penal State: What can Human Rights Do About It?, Els Dumortier, Serge Gutwirth, Sonja Snacken and Paul De Hert 7. Human Rights and Penalization in Central and Eastern Europe: the Case of Hungary, Miklos Levay 8. Human Rights as the Good and the Bad Conscience of Criminal Law, Francoise Tulkens 9. Victims and the Penal Process: Roles, Expectations and Disappointments, Noelle Languin and Christian-Nils Robert with the collaboration of Milena Abbiati and Mina Rauschenbach 11. Punitivity From a Victim's Perspective, Ivo Aertsen 12. Punitive Needs, Society and Public Opinion: An Explorative Study of Ambivalent Attitudes to Punishment and Criminal Justice, Kristof Verfaillie

Resisting punitiveness in Europe? : welfare, human rights and democracy

Twenty years ago, we described how changing prison populations in western countries result from a complex interaction between criminality, external (demography, economy), internal (criminal justice policies) and intermediate factors (public opinion, politics and media). While the outcome of these interactions is contingent, we advocated a reductionist penal policy in order to curb penal inflation. Subsequent macro-sociological analyses and comparative penological studies raised important questions though concerning the possibilities for political action to influence levels of punitiveness. This article looks again into the scope for political decision making in fostering penal moderation in western countries. By elaborating on a relational concept of ‘legitimacy’ of policies, we argue that moderate penal policies can politically be legitimized through appeal to dignity and human rights as fundamental values.

Sonja Snacken

Papers

Resisting punitiveness in Europe

Penal Policy and Practice in Belgium

A Reductionist Penal Policy and European Human Rights Standards

Resisting punitiveness in Europe? : welfare, human rights and democracy

Punishment, legitimate policies and values: Penal moderation, dignity and human rights