This article reflects on the international reception of the book Prisons of Poverty as revelator of penal developments in advanced societies over the past decade. It shows that the global firestorm of "law and order" inspired by the United States that the book detected in 1999 has continued to rage far and wide. Indeed, it has extended from First- to Second-World countries and has altered punishment politics and policies around the globe in ways that no one foresaw and would have thought possible some 15 years ago. It extends the analysis of the role of think tanks (especially the Manhattan Institute) in the diffusion of US-style crime-fighting notions and nostrums in Latin America as one element of the international circulation of pro-market policy packages fostering the punitive management of poverty. It elaborates and revises the original model of the link between neoliberalism and punitive penality, leading to the analysis of state-crafting in the age of social insecurity developed in the book Punishing the Poor.
Criminal Justice; Zero Tolerance; Think Tanks; Penal State; Policy Transfer; Neoliberalism; Globalization
