The closing years of the 20th century saw the circulation of many theories proposing that criminal justice and penality are undergoing radical transformation. The paper reviews the current status of three of these, concerned with “postmodern penality”, the “death of the social”, and the “risk society”. While each can be linked with recognisable and important changes, in general they have exaggerated the universality and impact of the transformations concerned. In part this is because they adopt frameworks of analysis that minimise the role of relational politics, and thus underestimate: the impact of resistance to change; the instability of programs and their tendencies toward hybridity; and the emergence of other, competing, transformational tendencies. Such theoretical schema need to be regarded more as resources for a politics of crime and penality, than predictions of catastrophic change and maps of the future.
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