Why Aren't German Penal Policies Harsher and Imprisonment Rates Higher?

It is common for reformist academics, human rights advocates, and political liberals to bemoan harsher public attitudes towards crime and criminals, populist posturing by politicians, and more repressive penal policies. Some years ago, sociologist David Garland, a leading scholar of this subject, described increasingly repressive strategies of crime control in contemporary Britain, Australia, and the United States, ‘and elsewhere, too'. Some years later Hans-Jörg Albrecht called Garland to task for that ‘and elsewhere, too,’ noting that what happens in English-speaking countries does not inexorably happen elsewhere and that penal policies in many Western countries were not becoming more repressive or more politicised in parallel with American and British developments.