Introduction

This chapter will explore the ways that the rise of the New Right in the mid-1970s and the subsequent dominance of neoliberal ideas had a profound influence on welfare and penal policy. One of the main themes in this volume is that these two areas are inextricably linked. This is not simply to say that they follow the same trajectory or that they can be used as the axis of a graph. Hinton (2016) shows that the development of US President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programmes took place as the foundations of the modern US penal state were taking shape. The failure of these programmes to prevent the explosion of urban riots in the late 1960s was used by opponents of a broader social state to argue that all such programmes were futile and a waste of public money. The result was a consensus that saw increased use of imprisonment in the penal sphere and conditionality and surveillance in welfare as the solutions to the problems of poverty. A similar pattern emerged in the UK in the Blair years: the greater investment in social and welfare programmes did not prevent the continued rise of the penal state. This is partly because of a strategic decision by New Labour that it would not allow its opponents to portray it as weak on crime. It also reflects the communitarian values that underpinned the New Labour project. The analysis presented here is influenced by Simon's (2007) notion of Governing Through Crime, discussed in more depth later. Simon (2007) examined the politics of law and order in late modernity. Crime and punishment are clearly always political matters. The same is also true of welfare policy. However, until the election of right-wing governments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there had been something of a consensus on law and order. Hall (1979) was the first to note that the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher was breaking this mould. In doing so, as in other areas, Mrs Thatcher presented herself as being on the side of ordinary voters and against an elite–in this case, a liberal elite of penal scholars and policymakers in the CJS who focused on rehabilitation at the expense of punishment.