By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

statutes. As the research developed, content analysis was undertaken to identify thenature and frequency of different penal ‘frames’ (Altheide, 1996). In this case, thepenal frames included, for example, the ‘politicisation of crime control’, ‘criminaljustice’ and ‘law and order’. From here, search words were used to locate specific‘themes’ as they emerged with the arguments, such as ‘public opinion’, ‘prisonpopulation’, ‘public expectation’ and ‘overcrowding’. Once these themes wereidentified, the discourse was analysed to determine how language differed amongkey actors. For example, in Chapter Three an analysis was conducted ofparliamentary debates to determine whether Members of Parliament (MPs) had takento using expressive rhetoric common to law and order politics when implementingpenal policy. These research techniques were employed as they offered a method ofexamining the justifications and key influences in the development of penal policy.Using the frameworks established in the Introduction, Chapter One analyses thetransformation that took place in New Zealand from the post­war years when thepenal­welfare framework prevailed to the turn of the twenty­first century when penalpopulism began to dominate. Of particular significance in New Zealand was a lawand order referendum posed to the public in 1999. This chapter explores how thisreferendum established public opinion as an authoritative force in penal policy.Chapter Two explores the concept of the penal policy ‘pressure group’ andexamines, in particular, the rise of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, a unique law andorder lobby group in New Zealand. It uses the penal populist framework developedearlier to analyse the strategies employed by the Sensible Sentencing Trust to gainpublic support, outlining how this group has promoted, with great effect, the voice of‘ordinary people’ as a force to be reckoned with in the development of penal policy.The chapter also explores the transformation of the victim in the criminal justicesystem and the way in which the idea of the ‘symbolic victim’ (Cressey, 1992) hasincreasingly been used by the Sensible Sentencing Trust and politicians to evokeemotions and generate public support for punitive policies.Chapter Three analyses the development of four statutes introduced in the aftermathof the 1999 referendum: the Sentencing Act 2002, the Parole Act 2002, the Victims’Rights Act 2002 and the Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act 2005. It explores therelationship between politicians and the public and the influence the latter had in the18