Authoritarian exclusion and laissez-faire inclusion: Comparing the punishment of men convicted of sex offenses in England & Wales and Norway

Abstract

Comparative penologists have described neoliberal and social democratic jurisdictions as though they exist at opposite ends of a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, and as though neoliberal states are inactive and social democratic states are invasive. This article, which is based on more than 129 interviews with men convicted of sex offenses in England & Wales and Norway, uses Cohen's work on inclusion and McNeill's typology of rehabilitative forms to complicate this simplistic binary. It argues that the punishment of men convicted of sex offenses in England & Wales was demanding but exclusionary; it imposed strict legal restrictions on these men during and after their imprisonment, blocking them from engaging in social and moral rehabilitation and providing a limited and treacherous route to change. In Norway, punishment operated in a way that was formally inclusionary but surprisingly laissez-faire: Prisoners retained their legal rights during and after their incarceration, but the lack of opportunities to discuss their offending meant that their sentences were rarely experienced as meaningful, and their formal inclusion was not enough for them to feel substantially included after release.