Some years ago, the authors coined the term ‘coercive confinement’ to embrace ‘not only the formal sites of incarceration that are normally associated with the criminal justice system but also psychiatric hospitals, homes for unmarried mothers and various residential institutions for children placed by the courts’.
We argued that these institutions were seldom taken into account in criminological analyses and that their exclusion was to the detriment of arriving at a rounded assessment of a society’s level of punitiveness and how it might have changed over time. The nub of the argument was that if the prison was used as a proxy for punitiveness, then Ireland, like many other countries in the Global North, was characterized by a trajectory that was steady, if not relentlessly, upward over the past half-century.
However, if coercive confinement was chosen as the metric, what became evident was a steep trend in the opposite direction. Our challenge to other academics was to explore the extent to which these contradictory patterns might be found in other places, at other times, with a view to adding nuance both to the empirical picture and its interpretation.