Contemporary Crises 13: 311-326, 1989.

© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

An introduction: Fifty years later, Punishment and Social

Structure in comparative analysis

DARIO MELOSSI
University of California, Department of Sociology, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A.

A number of years ago, Donald R. Cressey wrote a short essay - an essay, he

used to say, written with the purpose of "copyrighting" a few ideas - entitled
"Hypotheses in the Sociology of Punishment" (1955). In this essay, Cressey
complained that the contributions to the field of the sociology of punishment
were very few. He went on to enumerate the few exceptions. There was
Durkheim's essay, "Deux lois de l'ésecution p6nale" (1900), in which Durk-
heim in accordance with his more general thesis in The Division of Labor in
Society (1893), explained progress in the civilization of penalties as a conse-
quence of the secularization of criminal law. There was Svend Ranulf's idea
that the moral indignation necessary to produce strongly punitive reactions to
crime is linked to the presence in society of a large petty bourgeoisie (1938).
There was of course Edwin H. Sutherland's theory of a "consistency" between
dominant culture and "the methods of treatment of criminals" (1939: 348).
And finally there was Georg Rusche's concept of a relationship between
modalities of punishment and the state of the labor market, according to which
the harshness of penalties is inversely proportional to the historically given
value of human beings, i.e. the value of their labor. Penalties taust anyway
always be such as to generate a penal condition worse than the condition of the
lowest strata of free workers (the so-called "less eligibility" principle) (1933).
What all these contributions had in common was their refusal to be content
with what I like to call the "legal syllogism", i.e. the commonsensical idea,
originating in the classical school of criminal law, that punishment is simply the
consequence of crime and that, therefore, if there is a need for sociological
explanation, such explanation concerns criminal behavior and not the punish-
ment of this behavior. In this view, in fact, the latter was not conceivable
independently of crime: social structure explains crime and crime explains
punishment. This is the way lawyers and judges and most of those who are in
contact with the criminal justice system, tend to think. This is the way the
general public tends to think too.
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Punishment and Social Structure revisited

i

The essays presented in this special issue of Contemporary Crises stand in

opposition to this widespread way of thinking and focus on the research
tradition deriving in particular from Georg Rusche. 1 Rusche's manuscript,
later revised and completed by Otto Kirchheimer, became Punishment and
Social Structure, one of the few important books in the sociology of punish-
ment, a book that Michel Foucault benignly graced with the epithet of the
"grand livre" (1975: 24), and of which we celebrate this year the fiftieth
anniversary (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939). In spite of Sutherland's and
Sellin's favourable reviews, the book had a rather lukewarm reception at the
time.
After Russell & Russell reissued it in 1968, a new interest for the book
developed. That period was more favorable to the main thesis of Punishment
and Social Structure, that, establishing a relationship between social-structural
variables, such as the state of the labor market, and the changing modalities of
punishment over time, represented a challenge to the "legal syllogism", a
challenge that called into question the very legitimation of the "State's" power
to punish. This power bears the seal of sovereignty:

For the Subjects did not give the Soveraign that right [of Punishing]; but
onely in laying down theirs, strengthned hirn to use his own, as he should
think fit, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to
him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall Law) as
entire, as in the condition of meer Nature, and of warre of every one against
his neighbour. (Hobbes 1651: 354)

However, "the fact for which a man is Punished, ought first to be Judged by
publique Authority, to be a transgression of the Law" (ibidem). Only that kind
of punishment that is the consequence of a crime, is in fact a just punishment.
Otherwise, it is not a punishment, is an "act of hostility". If therefore the
sociologist selects punishment as an object of analysis that is methodologically
independent from criminal behavior - thereby "bracketed" as the source of
punishment- this is a politically suspect selection. Would in fact the sociologist
dare suggest that the operations of the penal system are capricious, and may be
driven by interests other than the attainment of justice?
1968 was a better time than 1939 to question stares' legitimation claims. It
was a time when both the form and the traditional purpose of the modern form
of punishment, imprisonment, were deeply challenged. Today Don Cressey
could never complain of the paucity of studies on punishment. Besides Michel
Foucault's famous book - a real signpost of the early 1970s intellectual milieu
weil beyond the borders of studies on punishment - the number of denouncia-
 313

tions of the socio-historical roots and perverse effects of imprisonment were so

many that they could only be matched, a few years later, especially in the
United States, by ever increasing simpleminded calls for longer, harsher, and
more frequent terms of imprisonment.

Quality and quantity of punishment: the issue of decarceration

Researchers developed Rusche's hypotheses toward two main directions of

research, the quality and quantity of punishment, according to a distinction
already made by Durkheim (1900). As far as quality was concerned, the obj ect
of investigation was the consistency, as Sutherland called it, between a given
social system and a specific type of punishment. So, for instance, Pashukanis,
Foucault, Melossi and Pavarini, focussed their research on the specific charac-
teristics of modern imprisonment in relation to a capitalist, disciplinary, and
industrial society. Connected to this view, was the idea that a specific mode of
punishment followed a certain parabolic trajectory, from inception to conclu-
sion. This idea - central to the debate about decarceration - bridges research
on quality and quantity of punishment because a downward direction in the
usage of a specific form of punishment may obviously lead to the disappear-
ance of that form and its replacement with a different punitive modality.
Circa 1970, this seemed to be very much the case for imprisonment and it is
thus understandable that Andrew Scull, in 1977, announced to the world that
imprisonment had reached the tail-end of its parabolic trajectory. The sub-
sequent sharp rise in the 1970s and 1980s has brought many analysts, in prirnis
Andrew Scull in the new Introduction to his book (1984), to dismiss this
hypothesis. However, there is no reason why we should extrapolate only from
data of the United Stares, i.e. "from the worst case available", to use the words
of the enlightened Director of Research of the Dutch Ministry of Justice at the
10th International Congress on Criminology (van Dijk 1988).
The first conceptual question that must be addressed is the question of
"decarceration". Its common indicator, is usually taken to be the rate of
inmates present in prison at the end of the year, or that entered during the
year, per every 100,000 in the population. However, other rate bases could
also be used for the statistical rate, such as the crime rate or the percentage of
people "at risk", in which case the hypothesis of a decarceration process -
conceived of as a diminishing punitive-custodial response to the same amount
of crime or to the same number of people at risk over time - would be less
easily falsifiable, even in the case of the United States, because both of these
rate bases have also increased very much during about the same period
(Inverarity and Grattet in this issue; Lynch 1987; Hale in this issue). In view
however of the fact that the official crime rate, the only one to which we can
314

refer in the long run, is essentially a measure of the interaction between

criminal behavior and policing behavior, a more correct statement would
probably be that policing has become a more pervasive form of social control
over time than imprisonment. In fact, this statement would point, I believe,
toward the most poignant concept of decarceration, i.e. the idea of decarcer-
ation as the progressive loss of the centrality of imprisonment as a means of
control in contemporary societies. Decarceration, in other words, should be
conceptualized as the diminishing relative weight of imprisonment in the
whole economy of control.
In this issue of Contemporary Crises, James Inverarity and Ryken Grattet
lead the way in pointing to empirical studies of possible trade-offs between
different institutions of social control. Of course the difficulty in drawing the
boundaries of the area of social control, not only empirically but also concep-
tually (Melossi 1989), makes a correct specification of such trade-offs problem-
atic. One may tentatively suggest that they can hardly be limited to in-
stitutional forms of social control. The most distinctive trait of contemporary
forms of social control is in fact their persuasive, communicative, and diffuse
character, as in the functioning of mass-media, in the extension and trans-
formation of contemporary policing, or in the kind of political developments
summed up by Benjamin Ginsberg in the expression "the captive public"
(1986).
Even if we were to consider the traditional concept of decarceration, how-
ever, based on the general population, we would still find that apparently, in
this century, long periods of decarceration obtained in many European coun-
tries (Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland), and
in Japan, and Australia (Matthews 1987; van Dijk 1988; Melossi 1985a; Barré
1986; Laffargue and Godefroy in this issue; Christie 1968; Killias and Grand-
jean 1986; Daga 1984).
If one considers the historical pattern in the movement of imprisonment
rates of a number of different countries, one will notice certain correspond-
ences. After prison systems were generally put in place, between the beginning
of the nineteenth-century and the 1860s, there was an increase in imprison-
ment rates until about the second half of the century. At this point, in most
European and North American countries, the rate of imprisonment, relative
to the population, started to decline up until World War I. Between the two
wars there was then some stability eren if the rate during the period between
the Great Crash of 1929 and World War Il shows a tendency to increase,
especially in those countries which felt the impact of the economic depression
most strongly. Finally after a rather sharp after-war peak around 1945-46,
there was a bifurcation between "carcerating" countries (like the United
States, England, Canada) and "decarcerating" countries (like Italy, Japan,
and the Scandinavian countries). In both groups however, there was a tenden-
 315

cy toward a decline or a slow-down during the 1960s, and a generalized

increase after 1970.

Cycles of punishing behavior

We can imagine punishing behavior developing in ways not very dissimilar

from those described by Joseph Schumpeter in Business Cycle (Schumpeter
1939: I: 193-219). There is first of all a secular trend, e.g. an upward trend in
the nineteenth-century followed by a downward trend in the twentieth-centu-
ry. There are then long-term oscillations, with cycles lasting about 40-50 years
- oscillations that the economist N.D. Kondratieff called "long waves" (1935).
These are probably the most relevant to our purposes, because we can sensibly
hypothesize that the viscosity of institutional and cultural change is rauch
greater than that of purely economic matters. Finally, there are short-term
oscillations similar to those that usually characterize business cycles proper.
The "real curve" may be represented as the sum of all these different ideal-
typical oscillations.
As David Greenberg has noticed, an oscillatory motion in an indicator -
such as imprisonment rates - may be represented as driven either by a self-
regulating mechanism based on a feedback principle, or by an outside force
following an oscillatory trajectory (Greenberg 1977: 647). Both cases have
been hypothesized and tested in the literature on imprisonment rates. The
self-regulating case has been presented in the mainly endogenous models by A1
Blumstein and collaborators (1977), and by Richard Berk and collaborators
(1983). These models are based on the assumption that the main changes in
imprisonment rates are due to action internal to the penal and correctional
systems lato sensu, and are determined by such institutional and administrative
decisions as prison building, parole board policies, pressures of the peni-
tentiary administration on sentencing and law-making policies, and the like.
The outside force case has been presented instead in the mainly exogenous
models of Jankovic (1977), Greenberg (1977), and Box and Hale (1982), based
on an adaptation of the Ruschean assumption that the most relevant changes
in the degree of usage of imprisonment are due to social-structural change,
especially changes in the labor market and in social and economic conditions.
Before examining these latter models in more detail, it must be pointed out
that they do not certainly exhaust the range of possible exogenous hypotheses.
Other exogenous reasons that have been hypothesized are based for instance
on the impact of demographic and political variables (Blumstein et al. 1980;
Greenberg 1980). Probably the "right" model is based on a mix of all these
hypotheses some of which cannot be easily disentangled from each other
(Inverarity and McCarthy 1988). For instance, it is rather mechanistic to think
316

that the feed-back, self-regulating mechanism described by Blumstein and

collaborators may be independent of political influences and filters. According
to research by Richard Berk and collaborators, parole was consciously used in
California between 1907 and 1977 to regulate prison population. The system
broke down, however, when in 1977, under popular pressure, the legislature
made parole release impossible in a significant number of cases (Berk et al.
1983). At the same time, it is rather hard to disentangle an argument based on
demographics- according to which the crime rate, and later the imprisonment
rate, are essentially functions of the size of the cohort of young males, the
group typically at risk - from one based on the economy and especially
unemployment, because so much unemployment is concentrated among
young males. Finally, as we will see later, arguments based on politics and the
economy are connected to each other in the idea of the political-business cycle.
Prison in fact has essentially a symbolic, ideological role, that cannot be
conceived of as directly functional to the economy (Jankovic, as we will see,
did not succeed in sustaining such a claim). So, the fact that imprisonment
rates are influenced, to a degree, by the economy, means that economic
indicators "measure" a type of social change that in turn ends up being
influential on imprisonment (cf. below).
To go back to the tradition inspired by Rusche's work, the same line of
inquiry was also developed independently by authors such as Edwin Suther-
land (1934 and 1939), Evgeny Pashukanis (1924), and more recently Niels
Christie (1968). They each based their analyses on the central idea that the
value of human beings depends on the value that is most respected in the
society in which they belong, and that, in industrial societies, is the value of
their labor. Therefore, the degree of usage of imprisonment in a given society
(i.e. the amount of time spent in prison per capita) depends on the state of the
labor market and, more generally, on the conditions of the working class. This
theory not only links imprisonment and the economy but also accounts for the
period of widespread decarceration that took place in the Western world
between the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first few
decades of the twentieth century when everywhere, even if at different times, a
generalized improvement in the living conditions of the working class took
place. Unfortunately, the theory is less convincing in addressing the increased
imprisonment in certain countries after 1945, i.e. in the most prosperous period
in the history of humanity, even if there is no doubt, however, that even after
1945, the largest increases in imprisonment rates have corresponded to periods
of economic crisis3
It might however be that a revisitation of Rusche's theses today cannot
escape discussing what is commonly referred to as a "dual labor market", not
only in terms of the distinction, on the side of demand, between monopoly and
competitive sectors of the economy (Inverarity and McCarthy 1988), but also,
 317

on the side of supply, in terms of a labor force structured by race, ethnicity, and
gender. It goes to Llad Phillips and Harold Votey's credit to have been among
the first to point out, years ago, that the ever increasing rates of property crime
in the 1960s in the United States, were more sensitive to the rate of non-
participation in the labor force than to the rate of unemployment. In other
words, if it was true that crime had been going up and unemployment had
stayed down, it was also true that the rate of non-participation in the labor
market for young non-white males had been going up as weil (Phillips, Votey
and Maxwell 1972).
In the "classic" version presented by Rusche, the lowest strata of an indige-
nous working class was seen as the "dangerous" class, the "natural" candidate
for imprisonment, for which it was consistent to hypothesize therefore a
relationship between its size and the degree of usage of prisons. In contempo-
rary "advanced" societies, however, the lower bottom, i.e. the "dangerous"
classes, are defined by a mix of economic and racial, ethnic and national
references. Imprisonment correspondingly may be in the process of becoming
more sensitive to variations in the conditions of this particular sector of the
population than of the general sector of the unemployed. Black young males in
the United States and England, as demonstrated in the papers by William J.
Sabol and Chris Hale in this issue, as weil as "foreign" immigrants in France or
Italy (Laffargue and Godefroy in this issue; US RD 1984: 19-20), are therefore
becoming a privileged target group for imprisonment, all well overrepresented
in the prison population relative to their quota in the general population. The
characteristics of a "career criminal", the biographical probability of periods
of incarceration, and racial, ethnic and national backgrounds specific to each
country, all tend to be substantially correlated. Bernard Laffargue and Thierry
Godefroy rightly point out that a "penal-penalizing" circuit has thus been
created, which in the case of France for example, comprises "the sub-proletar-
iat and the most fragile part of the working class - youth and foreigners" (in
this issue: pp. 371-404).

Economy and imprisonment: the case of Italy (1896-1965)

How a r e a changing economy and changing imprisonment rates connected?

One would expect crime to be the intervening variable, according to the
wisdom of the legal syllogism. What typically happens when one tries to test a
model inspired by such logic? In the case of Italian time-series data of the
business cycle, and of imprisonment, conviction and crime rates, for the period
1896--1965 (Melossi 1985a), 3 the results showed that the significant negative
association between business cycle and imprisonment rates was not mediated
through the statistically available rate of general criminal behavior. Similar
318

results were obtained in the analyses of data from other legal systems, such as
the United States federal and state prison systems (Jankovic 1977; Yaeger
1979; Inverarity and McCarthy 1988), Canada (Greenberg 1977), England and
Wales (Box and Hale 1982).
In my study of the Italian case, I found two associations, independent of
each other, between convictions and imprisonment on the one hand, and a
measure of the business cycle- per capita national income- and imprisonment
on the other. More specifically, the results showed that a change of one unit in
the business cycle indicator was inversely associated with a change of 0.1692 in
prison admissions. This is hardly trivial. It amounts to saying that a yearly
increase of Lire 100 (1938) per capita in the national income - a rather average
year-to-year change for the period considered - would be associated with a
decline of 9.678 prison admissions in one year, given the Italian population in
1985.
These results are partially consistent with the results of the research based
on other legal systems, a common finding of which is a statistically significant
association between business cycle indicators and imprisonment indicators.
Crime rates, however, do not seem to be simultaneously associated with either
the business cycle indicator or imprisonment rates. 4The common explanation
via criminal activity, is therefore excluded in my study as weil as in the
mentioned literature. The nature of the association between imprisonment
and the business cycle remains elusive.

Economy and imprisonment: an elusive relationship

The concept of "the state" has orten been used to help researchers try to get
out of this quandary, with a move that Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull have
described as typical of "an emerging Marxist criminology and sociology of
law" which has developed the "social control" aspects of so-called labeling
theory in a direction that "returned the state to the centre of the drama"
(Cohen and Scul11983: 7). Ivan Jankovic tried for instance to give an answer to
the research question about the economy and imprisonment by hypothesizing
that:

[...] under conditions which make it profitable to maintain a permanent

oversupply of labor - what Marx [...] called the "surplus population" or
"reserve army of labor" - imprisonment can be used to regulate the size of
the surplus labor force. This surplus population depends directly on the state
for its economic welfare. It is supported by a network of "projects and
services which are required to maintain social harmony- to fulfill the state's
"legitimization" function" (O'Connor 1973: 7). These projects and services
 319

are "social expenses" of the state. Two main components of the state's effort
to support, and thus control, the surplus population are the social welfare
system and the criminal justice system. Given the persistence and the
magnitude of the surplus population in advanced capitalist eountries, im-
prisonment may serve to contain a fraction of it and to manipulate its size.
(Jankovic 1977: 95-96)

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Leviathan seemed in fact to be the ideal stand-in
for the real culprits in a script that was quite popular at the time and whose
most celebrated model was probably Louis Althusser's famous essay on the
State "ideological" and "repressive" apparatuses (1970). Thanks to the artifi-
cial man, analysts did not need to reconstruct the causal chain of typical
orientations and actions relating changes in economic indicators to criminal
and penal policy decisions and actual rates of imprisonment. They had a Deus
ex-machina called "state" descend and take care of it all.
However, there were a number of problems with Jankovic's hypothesis, as
weil as with the more general theoretical framework it was derived from. First
of all, it did not work. The number of people in state and federal prisons
seemed too small- even in the United Stares- to really make a dent among the
unemployed - as Jankovic had to conclude (1977: 100). Secondly, the theoret-
ical nature of the link between unemployment and imprisonment remained
undetermined. Framed in the language presented above, Jankovic's concep-
tualization of the link seemed furthermore to lead to a highly problematic
conspiratorial reconstruction of the activities of the criminal justice system.
Thirdly and most importantly, the same conceptualization completely neglect-
ed the symbolic nature of punishment (cf. below).
I agree with James Inverarity and Ryken Grattet's conclusion, therefore,
that "capitalist states appear to lack coherent social control strategies" (in this
issue: pp. 351-370), even if one might observe that a reason for that is simply
that "states" cannot have strategies (Melossi 1989). Steve Box and Chris Hale
later developed David Greenberg's original hypothesis that the connection of
unemployment and imprisonment is essentially due to the "unintended conse-
quences" of a number of individual decisions based on considerations such as
judges' greater willingness to let a defendant go free if he has a job (Box and
Hale 1982; Greenberg 1977: 650). Even if certainly sensible, this type of
explanation ought to be ffamed within a more general picture of movements in
publie opinion and hegemonic ideologies, as I tried to do in my work with
Italian data and as Chris Hale does in his article in this issue which offers a
reconstruction of discursive changes on the British political scene after 1945
and their linkages to penal changes.
"The state" need not be invoked in fact to explain variations in punishment
for crime. Not should speculations about the motives of individual agents of
320

control be invoked. The overall strategy that should be followed consists of

establishing a "discursive chain" between, on the one hand, the ways in which
the social and political conflicts around the business cycle are rationalized and
accounted for, and, on the other, the vocabularies of motive (Mills 1940) which
are available to the agencies of penal control as they account for their actions.
It is a worthy hypothesis that the observed association between change in
imprisonment rates and change in economic indicators, an association which is
not mediated by change in crime rates, depends on an intervening variable that
I have termed "vocabularies of punitive motive" (Melossi 1985a). The chang-
ing nature of such vocabularies depends on pendulum-like movements in the
ùmoral climate" of a society, movements which accompany the alternation of
economic periods of expansion and recession. These oscillations are in turn the
product of interactions among classes, groups and organizations- interactions
which influence, for instance, the production of the "economic" indicators
that make up what we call "the business cycle". Such indicators as the produc-
tion of goods and services, or the number of people who participate in the
labor force, or who are unemployed, are measures of complex events, con-
nected in innumerable ways to changing motivational characterizations. In the
case of punishment, the set of events which are usually described in order to
characterize periods of economic recession, are linked, through a discursive
chain, to an increase in the propensity to severity by the practitioners and
theoreticians of the criminal justice system, as weil as by public opinion in
general. The exact contrary takes place instead in periods characterized by
' prosperity". Within the (empirically determinate) boundaries delineated by
the vocabulary of the law on the books, public officials who are in charge of law
enforcement account for their behavior by using vocabularies of punitive
motive in a manner which is roughly oscillating over time, and is a response,
among other things, to variations in the mood of the public, which in turn is
connected to roughly cyclical economic indicators.

A grounded labeling theory

FoUowing David Greenberg's seminal intuition (1977: 651), we should con-

ceive of the labeling process neither simply as a process affected by individual
ascriptive traits, nor as affected solely by the characteristics of the interaction
between the labeled and the labeler. A "grounded labeling theory" concerns
itself also with the way in which variable social-structural elements, like e.g.
"the political business cycle", impinge upon the variable degree of probability
that a certain behavior will be defined as normal or deviant (Melossi 1985a:
182; Melossi 1985b: 202).
 321

In this respect, it is interesting to consider Martin Killias and Christian

Grandjean's study of unemployment and imprisonment rate in Switzerland
from 1890 to 1941 (1986). One of their hypotheses was that social conflict,
measured by the number of strikes, may be positively associated with impris-
onment rates. Their finding, the result of multivariate analysis, was that strikes
actually are negatively associated with imprisonment (1986: 315). This is a very
interesting finding, because business cycle students have always considered
strikes as an indicator of a labor market in which demand for labor is strong
and the bearers of labor, i.e. the workers, can afford to try to impose their
conditions. Marxist theories of the political business cycle, for instance, are
based on the idea that economic crises are an expression of the capitalists'
response to a situation of near full employment (Kalecki 1943). Political
"repression" is hardly a cause of crowded prisons, at least in democratic
countries, pace the rebellist ideology of the 1960s. In these societies, workers'
militancy is at its uppermost strength in times of prosperity, that is when there
are more strikes and fewer people are in prisons. It may certainly have
happened, especially in the past, that in the downward turn of the business
cycle, jails started to receive a number of union members, because in this
period of the cycle, business attacks the resistance of the working class through
technological change and sometimes also outright "repression". This is usually
much more important for its symbolic (deterrent) character, than for its
statistical relevance and is generally part of a more pervasive social effort at
disciplining labor. Such disciplining, however, though it may happen to be the
openly declared objective of specific business groups and political associ-
ations, takes place more generally as the indirect byproduct of the complex
social situation sketched above. Strikes, and other events such as violence, are
socially perceived as symptoms of division and conflict, lack of moral cohe-
sion, in a (Durkheimian) word, anomie. This perception, which is certainly
also fed by "moral entrepreneurs" (Becker 1963), contributes to the making of
a widespread conviction that it is necessary to give society new cohesion. This
process of reformation may certainly occurr around the political and economic
agenda of specific classes, groups, or organizations. However, along with this
manifest politics, another one develops, which is at the same time both overt
and hidden, and in which social reformation occurs on a symbolic ground, as in
the solidarity of the group against the common enemy, "the criminal". The
criminal, in fact, on the one hand

does not seriously endanger the structure of society by his destructive

activities, and on the other hand [...] is responsible for a sense of solidarity,
aroused among those whose attention would be otherwise centered upon
interests quite divergent from those of each other. (Mead 1918: 227)
322

According to this reconstruction, and as suggested in Killias and Grandjean's

Swiss data, prisons are less crowded during happy and prosperous times.
Prosperity however brings about conflicts, divisions, and feelings of insecurity.
Prisons therefore start to fill up following periods of prosperity, in the down-
ward part of the cycle, until they reach the point which economists call the
trough - when a defeated working class is less ready to strike and prisons are
full. » At that point the evils of recession become apparent, from unemploy-
ment to an excessive exploitation of workers, to "overcrowded" prisons. The
situation then starts changing again, climbing slowly toward the peak of the
cycle.
Two last remarks before the conclusions: as demonstrated in the results of
my Italian study, a statistically relevant association was observed between an
economic indicator, and the indicator for imprisonment, but not between an
economic indicator and the convictions to detentive punishment. Because Ital-
ian imprisonment data are largely influenced by preventive detentions, which
account for more than 50% of total incarcerations, this result indirectly
showed a greater degree of sensitivity of preventive detention decisions than of
sentencing to economic change. Similar results also obtained in the case of
France (Laffargue and Godefroy in this issue) and Switzerland (Killias and
Grandjean 1986). This seems to offer further proof of the soundness of the
general hypothesis here advanced because it is only in the preparatory stages
of the criminal trial, when the grounds for preventive detention, and not guilt,
are ascertained, that the judge making the decision to imprison the defendant
is subject to the influence of general impressions, streotypical views, and the
mood of public opinion, to a higher degree than the sentencing judge. 6
According to this same view, it may also be that instead of considering the
general (official) crime rate, as the intervening variable between the economy
and imprisonment, researchers should consider indexes of violent crime, such
as murders, robberies, rapes, and so forth. This kind of crime in fact lends itself
to situations of "moral panic" (Cohen 1973) and law and order campaigns
(Waller and Chan 1974-75: 64-65). In this case, however, violent crime should
not be used as an indicator of criminal behavior, but as an indicator of the
degree of moral panic in society.

Conclusions

In the same way in which Durkheim explained the invention of imprisonment

on the basis of a progressive secularization and mitigation of the criminal law,
or Rusche related major penological changes to social structural changes, the
discussion of sociological hypotheses regarding the quantitative production of
 323

imprisonment, allows us to return to a discussion of its quality, and modalities.

My hypothesis is that the ongoing deep changes in the nature of the whole
arena of social control, are connected to a decreasing role of imprisonment.
We certainly know very little about the size of such arena, within which a
process that appears to be of increasing carceration, at least in the United
States and the other "recarcerating" countries, might instead represent a
shrinking section of a much faster increasing arena of social control in general.
We may accept as certain only that the course set by Georg Rusche and Otto
Kirchheimer fifty years ago is still wide-open today to investigation by sociol-
ogists who, like Georg Rusche, dare step beyond the role of obliging tech-
nocrats of an unquestioned legal syllogism.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the European University Institute, Floren¢e, Italy, where
I conducted the research for this paper as a 1988-1989 Jean Monnet Fellow.

Notes

1. It is an interesting footnote in the history of criminological ideas that Cressey knew of Rusche-
at a time when practically no criminologists had even heard of his name - because Sutherland,
as weil as Thorsten Sellin, had been asked by Julian Gumperz, who represented in the United
States the soon-to-emigrate Frankfurt Institute, to review what would have been the first
publication of the School of Frankfurt overseas. Sutherland, as weil as SeUin, had a number of
criticisms for Rusche's manuscript, but essentially liked it and recommended its publication
after revisions. I have reconstructed the essentials of the genesis of the book, as weil as the
biography of Georg Rusche, in two articles (1978 and 1980).
2. It was exactly the opposite of what happened according to Andrew Scuil for whom decarcer-
ation was spun by the high costs of imprisonment in a period of fiscal crisis (1977). In fact
decarceration took place mostly in the prosperous 1960s and "recarceration" coincided with
the heavy recession between the late 1970s and the early 1980s.
3. The period between 1896 and 1965 is the only period for which overlapping series were
available.
4. The main issue here is whether an indicator of criminal behavior can sensibly be placed on a
path from the indicator representing the economy to sentencing and/of imprisonment. In the
Italian case the nexus between the economic indicator and imprisonment was simultaneous
whereas there was a statistically significant negative correlation between the economic in-
dicator and the indicator of the crime rate, which lagged of 1 and 2 years. This means that if
there is any causal relationship between the economy and crime and imprisonment, the impact
of the economy on imprisonment would precede the one on crime. This obviously excludes a
fortiori the role of a (general) crime rate as the intervening variable between the eeonomy and
imprisonment (whereas it confirms the most traditional theories on crime being associated
with poverty or at least impoverishment; cf. Chiricos 1987). Likewise I am not claiming that
324

change in the crime rates has never anything to do with convictions or imprisonment. In my
study of the Italian case, in fact, it does not, whereas in the case of the United States analyzed
by Inverarity and McCarthy it does (1988: 272), together with a direct effect of unemployment
on imprisonment. The simultaneity of the association between the economy and imprison-
ment is consistent with the hypothesis I am advancing in the following pages about a possible
sociological explanation of such association.
5. It should be pointed out that this roughly schematic reconstruction of the cycle applies
essentially to all the types of cycles discussed above even if it probably makes the most sense in
the "long wave" dimension.
6. In the research based on common law countries, however, imprisonment results to be directly
related to sentencing.

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