The Contemporary Penal Populism: the Global Trends and the Local Consequences

Abstract

The penal populism as a special approach to shaping the social reaction to crime has a global character and has been present for a few decades already. The global social changes connected with the appearance and strenthening of the neoliberal socioeconomic system, contributed to its appearance together with the role of the media, the changes of the appearing perception of the crime and the politization of crime. The basic characteristics refer to the establishment of new strategies of crime control, significant criminal-legal expansionism, more severe penal policy, the strengthening and expansion of the formal control, new penology. The most important consequence of the new criminal control practice is a great increase in the number of convicts with the prison penalty, which cannot be explained solely by the increase in crime. Since apart from the global character of the relevant social changes, the penal populism with its controversial consequences has not overtaken all the countries with the same intensity, a special attention is drawn by the countries which have kept the functional criminallegal system out of the new punitiveness. The relevant research show that the level of punitiveness is in a significantly stronger correlation with economic policy, i.e. investments into the social policy, than with the real state of crime. The local reception of the global trends, both generally and in the criminal legislation system of Serbia, is characterized by inconsistence and neglect of the institutional and cultural incompatibility and the standardisation of thy hybrid law institutes which have a great difficulty of fitting into the national legal systems.