By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

implementation of this legislation. The idea of symbolism is developed further in thischapter where ‘symbolic politics’ are explored (Tonry, 1996). In doing so, thechapter examines the influences behind different legislation and argues that thegovernment began introducing policies to satisfy public expectations, rather thanexamining the effectiveness of these policies. The chapter uses Garland’s (2001)commentary on the politicisation of crime control to further examine theseinfluences, looking specifically at penal discourse, where policies have becomeincreasingly ‘emotive’ and ‘expressive’.Chapter Four addresses and analyses the implementation of Effective Interventionsin 2006 and 2007 and explains how the government looked to reclaim attributesassociated with the post­war penal­welfare era in a bid to stop penal populism. Theattempt to reconstruct penal policy came to an end with the election of the Nationalgovernment in 2008. The chapter assesses the current prospects for penal populism,and the possibilities of resistance to it, in the aftermath of these developments.Overall this thesis argues that New Zealand society, like other Anglophone societies,has undergone a series of changes since the post­war years which has seen it changefrom a ‘secure’ society, where penal­welfare attributes dominated penalpolicymaking, to a society where penal populism prevails. Through the examinationof penal policy developments in New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, it argues that thepower of penal populism has become so strong that any attempts to resist it areunlikely to succeed without the strength of a secure political and social environment(like that which prevailed in the post­war era) to undermine populism’s power base.19