Various observers have raised the question of how our penal appetite relates to broader patterns of consumption in western societies. Most recently, Ian Loader (2009) has suggested that our appetite for punishment, much like our appetite for ice cream and other high-calorie foods, has been accelerated by broad cultural and policy developments and queried how we might develop strategies to moderate it. The relationship is not simply metaphorical. The prison boom and the food binge, along with the housing bubble, constitute parallel developments in advanced liberal societies. While they may all be reflections of the kind of deeper structural change in these societies often labeled ‘neo-liberalism’, I would suggest their relationships are often more direct—and that they can possibly be analytically reversed, yielding insights as to how restraint in one domain might be mobilized within another. This essay seeks to back out some ideas about moderation in punishment from emerging strategies to fight obesity.
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