Emeritus Professor John Pratt - Institute of Criminology

Many of the longstanding expectations of the form and extent that the punishment of crime should take in democratic societies like New Zealand have been overturned in the last two or three decades. At one end of this spectrum there have been dramatic increases in imprisonment; at the other, it has become possible to regulate and control the movement of those thought to be at risk of committing crime.  The penal populism that drives these trends can be understood as an attempt by governments to provide social cohesion in this way amidst the growing divisions and tensions caused by neo-liberal restructuring. However, this brand of populism was unable to achieve this task and has given way to a populist politics that threatens the democratic order itself. Yet the Covid-19 pandemic may prove to be democracy’s unlikely saviour. The forces necessary to eliminate Covid – belief in science and expert knowledge, trust in a strong central government and its bureaucracies, multi-national co-operation in conjunction with strong local social cohesion – also have the potential to bring an end to populism and neo-liberalism.

John Pratt was educated in England, gaining degrees in law and criminology from London, Keele and Sheffield universities. He began work at VUW in 1988 and was awarded a Personal Chair in 2003.  He is one of the world’s leading authorities on comparative penology and the history and sociology of penal policy and punishment. His seven research monographs include Penal Populism (2007), Contrasts in Punishment (2013) and Law, Insecurity and Risk Control (2020). He has also published six edited collections, 90 refereed journal articles and 55 book chapters. His writings have been translated into 12 languages and he has been invited to lecture or give conference addresses at universities in Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. He received the Radzinowitz Prize from the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Criminology in 2009.  He was a Fellow at the Straus Institute for Advanced Studies of Law and Justice, New York University 2010-11. He was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2012 and received the Society’s Mason Durie Medal in 2013. In 2018, he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology.

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