Penal Policy: Bringing a Neglected Field of Public Policy into Focus

By Alessandro Corda

Across much of the world, punishment occupies a remarkably prominent place in public life. Political campaigns regularly turn on questions of crime and security. Calls for expanded criminalization, tougher penalties, and stronger enforcement continue to shape legislative agendas. Punitive measures are routinely invoked as solutions to problems ranging from disorder and violence to migration, public health, and social insecurity. If punishment is everywhere, then, one might assume that penal policy has already received enough attention.

Yet the opposite is true.

Despite its profound effects on individual lives and social institutions, penal policy remains surprisingly underdeveloped as a distinct field of study. It is often absorbed into criminal law, treated as a subset of criminal justice administration, or folded into broader discussions of criminology. In public policy scholarship, meanwhile, punishment has frequently occupied a secondary position, overshadowed by fields such as social policy, education, welfare, healthcare, and economic governance. As a result, one of the state’s most powerful instruments, its authority to criminalize, punish, and curtail liberty, has too often escaped the level of analytical scrutiny that public policy scholars routinely devote to other forms of state action.

The Research Handbook on Penal Policy begins from the premise that this neglect matters.

Words matter too, and so do the concepts through which we understand public governance. One of the recurring difficulties in contemporary debates is that terms such as “crime policy”, “criminal policy”, “criminal justice policy”, and “penal policy” are frequently used interchangeably, obscuring important distinctions. Yet the decision to employ punishment is neither synonymous with preventing crime nor reducible to the enforcement of penalties or the administration of criminal justice institutions. Penal policy concerns something different and, in many ways, more fundamental: the principles, strategies, and practices through which states deploy their punitive power, whether through measures formally classified as “criminal” or through other punitive mechanisms. It asks when punishment should be used, against whom, for what purposes, under what constraints, and with what consequences.

‘The Research Handbook on Penal Policy brings together an impressive group of contributors, providing readers with a remarkably rich and wide-ranging set of reflections. The result is an unusually valuable collection that deserves to become a standard reference for scholars and researchers.’
– David Garland, New York University, USA

Viewed through this lens, penal policy emerges as a central domain of public governance. Decisions about criminalization, sentencing, imprisonment, probation, and other forms of penal intervention are not merely administrative matters. They are political choices that shape social relationships, distribute burdens and protections, allocate public resources, communicate moral judgments, and delineate the boundaries of state authority. Such decisions reveal how societies define deviance and respond to harm and insecurity, but also how they understand citizenship, responsibility, and, ultimately, justice.

The need to examine these choices critically is particularly acute today. In recent decades, penal policy has become increasingly entangled with wider transformations in governance. The rise of penal populism, the expansion of risk-based regulation, the growing influence of human rights frameworks, the transfer and translation of policy ideas, and the emergence of new technologies have all reshaped the landscape of punishment. At the same time, penal logics have extended well beyond the traditional boundaries of criminal justice. Societies increasingly seek to govern a wide range of social problems through punitive mechanisms and crime-control frameworks, often turning to criminalization, punishment, and coercion where other forms of public intervention might once have prevailed.

Paradoxically, just as penal policy has become more central to public life, it has also become harder to see clearly. Punishment is often presented as an inevitable response rather than a contingent political choice. Debates are framed in terms of necessity, urgency, or public demand, leaving little room to interrogate the assumptions, values, and interests underpinning particular policy directions. Yet punitive measures are never inevitable. They emerge from prior decisions about social priorities, the allocation of public resources, and the forms of state intervention deemed acceptable. They are the product of a broader chain of political and policy choices.

Why do some social problems become criminalized while others do not? Why do certain forms of harm attract severe responses while equally damaging harms remain largely outside the scope of punitive responses? Why do some societies rely more heavily on punishment than others? And why do punitive solutions often persist even when evidence of their effectiveness remains contested?

These questions cannot be answered adequately from within any single discipline or sub-discipline. The Research Handbook on Penal Policy advances an expansive vision of penal policy as a distinctive field of inquiry situated at the intersection of public governance, power, and social regulation. Its contributors examine punitive measures from multiple perspectives, exploring how they are formulated, justified, implemented, contested, and transformed across diverse jurisdictions and contexts.

A central theme running throughout the volume is that penal policy is neither tidy nor self-contained. It is shaped by competing values, institutional constraints, political struggles, historical legacies, and cultural narratives. It is influenced by policymakers, experts, judges, practitioners, advocacy groups, international organizations, and social movements. Understanding penal policy therefore requires moving beyond simplified accounts of rational decision-making and engaging with the complex realities through which punishment is produced and sustained.

This Research Handbook also seeks to bridge a longstanding divide between academic scholarship and policy practice. Penal policy is not merely an abstract object of study. It is a field in which ideas have immediate and often profound consequences. For that reason, scholarship must remain critically independent while also being capable of engaging constructively with policymakers, practitioners, and civil society actors. The most valuable research is not that which retreats from the real world, but that which helps illuminate it.

Asking “what is penal policy?” is therefore not simply a matter of definition. It is an invitation to rethink how punishment is understood within contemporary societies. It is a reminder that the exercise of penal power deserves the same level of scrutiny, reflection, and debate that is routinely devoted to other domains of public policy. And it is a call to recognize penal policy as a field that is not peripheral to governance but central to it.

‘By clarifying the place of penal policy in the larger framework of modern government, Alessandro Corda and colleagues not only help us analyze the political choices that route public policy goals toward punitive ends, they help in the struggle to make punishment a strategy of last resort. A major contribution and critical reorientation for the study of punishment and society and criminology globally.’
– Jonathan Simon, UC Berkeley School of Law, USA

Across 32 chapters written by 40 contributors from a range of disciplinary, methodological, and jurisdictional backgrounds, this Research Handbook provides the first comprehensive mapping of penal policy as a distinct field of inquiry. The volume is organized into six parts. Part I establishes key conceptual frameworks and analytical orientations. Part II examines the structural and normative dimensions underpinning penal policymaking. Part III offers jurisdictional insights from a variety of contexts, including the United States, England and Wales, Brazil, China, and the European Union. Part IV adopts a comparative perspective, highlighting both commonalities and divergences across penal systems in the Global North and the Global South. Part V focuses on penal policy “on the ground”, incorporating the perspectives of policymakers and academics with direct experience of institutions and processes through which penal policy is formulated and implemented. Finally, Part VI looks ahead to emerging research questions and contemporary challenges.

Together, the chapters demonstrate the richness of penal policy as an object of study and underscore its importance for understanding how societies deploy, justify, contest, and reform their powers of criminalization and punishment.

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Research Handbook on Penal Policy is edited by Alessandro Corda, Reader, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, UK