Escaping the prisoners' dilemma

Nicola Lacey is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at London School of Economics and Political Science.

The prisoners' dilemma in England and Wales

Over the last three decades, an ever-increasing prison population, along with a continuous law and order bidding war between the two main parties, have come to seem almost inevitable features of our political world. As governments struggle to establish their credentials for taking effective policy action, the support for strong law and order policies among a growing group of ‘floating' voters has led to an extreme politicisation of criminal justice policy. In the context of this politicisation, ‘law and order' has become a salient electoral issue within our adversarial political system, and it has become impossible for even the left-of-centre party, Labour, to sustain a focus on the social and economic causes of crime, or a welfarist approach to responses to crime. On Tony Blair's accession to the position of shadow Home Secretary, Labour accordingly began to abandon its traditional analysis in favour of a ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' platform...

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