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Francis Pakes, Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization. By David Nelken, ed. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011, 215pp. £60.00), The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 52, Issue 3, May 2012, Pages 679–681, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs007
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Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalisation starts with an introduction followed by a substantive chapter by David Nelken, one of the heavyweights of comparative criminology who, over the years, has built up an impressive oeuvre. The first substantive chapter is based on Nelken’s inaugural lecture given shortly after his appointment as G. J. Wiarda Professor at Utrecht in 2008. In it, he identifies, as a key criminological concern, the punitive turn that seems to be more or less global in scale. Likewise, David Downes discusses this punitive turn mainly but not exclusively evidenced by rising rates of incarceration. It is clear that not every country recently experienced such a turn and let us not forget that upturns can be followed by downturns and, when they happen, they bring a fair degree of academic excitement. As Downes argues, explaining such developments cannot be achieved via ‘positivistic formulae’ but through that blend of local knowledge and global perspective that he has applied so expertly for decades. The chapter ends with a demand for intellectual courage and comparative criminology’s imperative to be engaged—a point that comes through several of the contributions in this book.
