New Penology

In a series of papers published between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon coined the term new penology to describe the shift toward actuarial practices in the field of crime control that took place in the United States between the 1970s and the 1980s. It was during that period that a series of transformations in the narratives, objectives, and techniques to be used to control crime and offenders led to the emergence of a new conception of penal policy. Risk management strategies based on actuarial practices were established, with focus placed on aggregates, quantification, and formal and systemic rationality, and attention devoted to the statistical distribution of risks within the population. Consequently, crime control strategies became concerned with the identification, classification, ...