Penal populism first entered the scholarly vocabulary through the work of criminologist Anthony Bottoms, who described populist punitiveness as one of the main forces operating within contemporary criminal justice systems. The term captured how politicians, perceiving a deeply punitive public, pursue harsh penal policies for their own political gain. Later scholars broadened the concept. John Pratt described populism as a fundamental shift in the axis of penal power under the conditions of late modernity, while Mark Fenwick showed in the Japanese context that penal populism can also produce non-punitive policies, driven by an unmet demand for justice and security. What unites these accounts is the way penal policy becomes a reactive undertaking, supported not by evidence of effectiveness but by emotional resonance.

The authors illustrate the pattern with three contemporary cases. In the United States, following the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump argued on Fox News for what he called quick trials, complaining that criminal proceedings stretching over seven or eight years allow defendants to blame their circumstances. The authors note that such statements run directly against the presumption of innocence and against criminology’s core mission of understanding why crimes are committed. In Morocco, public debate over Article 507 of the Penal Code, which prescribes life imprisonment for robbery involving a weapon, revealed how a broad statutory definition of a weapon, one that could in theory include a screwdriver, allows punishment to jump from a five-year maximum to life imprisonment, a severity that provoked a rare counter-movement by the mothers of convicted defendants. In India, the brutal 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman known to the public as Nirbhaya generated massive protests and a government-appointed reform committee, yet the resulting 2013 criminal law amendments went further than the Verma Committee recommended, expanding the death penalty despite the committee’s explicit advice against it.

Across these cases, the authors identify a recurring architecture of claims. Populists insist the system is too lenient and demand severity. They place the victim and public safety at the center of debate, framed in zero-sum terms against legal safeguards. They reject criminological inquiry into the social determinants of crime as elitist indulgence. They position themselves as the authentic voice of ordinary people against out-of-touch experts. And they appeal to emotion rather than reason, mobilising outrage and fear as political capital. The murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993, framed as the loss of America’s innocent child, exemplifies how such emotional mobilisation can drive rapid legal change, producing California’s Three-Strikes law within months of the abduction.

The criminological case against these claims is stark. The most widely diffused populist assumption holds that harsher penalties deter crime because rational actors weigh potential gains against potential losses. Yet the empirical literature points the other way. Anthony Doob and Cheryl Webster’s examination of numerous studies found that most reviews do not support the claim that harsher sanctions deter, and the few studies that did were found to suffer from serious methodological or conceptual problems. Daniel Nagin’s assessment of deterrence research found that evidence for the certainty of punishment, particularly the probability of apprehension, is far more consistent than evidence for the severity of punishment. A meta-analysis by Travis Pratt and colleagues reached a similar conclusion, finding that the deterrent effects of formal legal sanctions are at best modest to negligible, and that punishment effects often shrink to zero when researchers control for factors such as self-control, peer influence, and antisocial attitudes. Strikingly, the most robust deterrents identified were informal sanctions such as shame and loss of respect, suggesting that fear of social costs outweighs fear of legal punishment.

Punitive sanctions do not merely fail to deter; they can actively undermine interventions that work. Mark Lipsey’s meta-analysis of 443 studies on juvenile delinquency treatment found that outcomes favoured treatment in 64.3 percent of studies, with the best programs reducing recidivism by ten to twenty percentage points. Some punitive interventions, notably deterrence-oriented programs such as shock incarceration and Scared Straight, produced negative effects, meaning that the tools promoted as making streets safer may be making them less safe. A review by Lipsey and Francis Cullen covering both juvenile and adult offending confirmed that supervision and sanctions show at best modest reductions in recidivism and sometimes increase reoffending, while rehabilitation treatments yield consistently positive and relatively large effects. Evidence-based frameworks such as the Risk-Need-Responsivity model, which tailors interventions to an offender’s risk level, criminogenic needs, and learning style, have been shown to reduce recidivism by an average of 17 percent in custodial settings and 35 percent in community settings when all three principles are properly implemented. Research on more than 55,000 prisoners released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2011 found that warehousing inmates without programming increased the odds of recidivism by 13 percent, while participation in effective interventions lowered those odds by 12 to 26 percent.

The authors anticipate an obvious objection: even if punitiveness fails as crime control, punishment serves other purposes. Here they draw on David Garland’s sociology of punishment, which treats punishment as a complex social institution, like the family or the economy, whose meaning cannot be reduced to any single instrumental goal. Populists are entitled, the authors concede, to demand justice and just deserts. But retribution, properly understood, does not license punitiveness. Andrew von Hirsch’s principle of commensurate deserts calls for proportion between the seriousness of a crime and the severity of punishment, and raising penalties for particular offences disrupts the internal ranking of the sentencing scale while overstating an offender’s blameworthiness. As Douglas Husak argues, retribution understood as the infliction of deserved punishment producing intrinsic value can be compatible with a restrictive, even abolitionist, stance toward imprisonment. The populist move from desert to ever-greater severity thus fails on moral as well as empirical grounds.

The democratic claim fares no better. Penal populism presents itself as the voice of the people, but public opinion research suggests that the punitive consensus politicians invoke is largely manufactured. Pierre Bourdieu famously argued that public opinion does not exist in the form its purveyors claim. Julian Roberts and colleagues, drawing on data from five countries, found a wide disjuncture between superficial opinion polls and more sophisticated measures, concluding that support for punitive policies is far less solid than politicians suggest, even though crude polls carry more weight with policymakers. Katherine Beckett’s research showed that public concern about crime and drugs is strongly associated with prior political initiative on those issues, indicating that concern is often politically fabricated rather than spontaneously held. Moreover, when members of the public are given information about the consequences of punitive policies, their support for punitiveness tends to decline, and surveys consistently show public support for rehabilitation alongside other goals of punishment.

The authors are careful to acknowledge context. Criminology itself bears some responsibility for the populist backlash. Robert Martinson’s famous 1974 claim that nothing works in rehabilitation eroded public trust in expert-led penal policy, and although Martinson later retracted much of his conclusion, the damage contributed to what Garland calls the culture of control, in which states abandoned the rehabilitative ideal for risk management and punitive display. Garland has since asked whether criminologists are doing enough to communicate their knowledge credibly, warning that failing to do so leaves the way open for dangerous populist alternatives. The authors also note that a level of genuine public punitiveness exists and is substantial; their point is that opinions formed in the absence of crucial information about consequences are difficult to justify as a basis for policy.

The study’s central contribution is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. By integrating criminology, restrained retributivism, the sociology of punishment, and public opinion research, Bourekkadi and Elarraj demonstrate that penal populism invokes criminology, morality, and democracy selectively yet satisfies none of them. Its policies appeal to emotion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy through claims of effectiveness and popular support that do not hold. The authors do not argue that punitive policies can never be defended, only that the usual justifications offered for them cannot survive scrutiny, and they hypothesise that reframing the debate around the genuine justification of punishment would drain much of the emotional appeal politicians exploit. Future research, they argue, should develop an alternative framework for penal policy, one grounded in evidence-based practice, proportionality, and democratic integrity, while addressing the structural conditions that allow populist penal policies to persist despite the fallacy of their claims.

Subject of Research: The justificatory failure of penal populism in contemporary criminal justice policy

Article Title: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims

Article References: Penal Populism and the Failure of Its Core Claims. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00588-z

Keywords: penal populism, criminology, criminal justice, deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, public opinion, punishment, evidence-based policy, populism, sentencing, sociology of punishment