Ice cream and incarceration

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between contemporary consumer desires and practices and public demands for security and punishment. My organizing suggestion is that punishment-centred public responses to crime, social disorder and terrorist threats (what has been termed penal excess) are today bound up with other, widespread social practices of excess. The article outlines the questions that need to be posed, and the practices that can usefully be investigated, in a bid to advance empirical enquiry into this way of understanding contemporary penality. In so doing, it proceeds as follows: I begin with a discussion of how the concept of excess (and its close cousins) has been and might potentially be applied to the social analysis of crime and crime control. I then make a case for understanding demands for security and punishment as an appetite and consider how we might examine the coupling of such appetites with identity, the market and the State in ways that can shed new light on the emergence of excessive, insecurity-reproducing penal practices. I conclude with some brief reflections on corrosive, self-defeating effects of such practices and how one may seek to moderate or counteract them.