Social Inclusion and Comparative Criminal Justice Policy

Abstract

This study intends to implement analytical tools in the field of comparative criminal justice policy. According to this goal, the author chooses the social inclusion/social exclusion dimension as the comparative framework, to the detriment of widely accepted high punitiveness/low punitiveness. A set of common policies and practices have been selected, as long as they are to some extent enforced in different national crime control systems across the industrialized world. They should materialize as indicators predicting either social exclusive or social exclusive outcomes. Thereafter, the author proposes to build a scale on the social inclusion/social exclusion dimension, where national crime control systems will be placed according to the aforementioned indicators. In each extreme of the scale one would hypothetically find one of the two most current antagonistic national crime control systems, that is, the Nordic European countries on the one side and the United States of America on the other. The study concludes by confronting possible methodological objections.