Introduction to the debate about official policies on the criminal field

Abstract

The current process of economic and financial globalization has elicited contradictory answers in the formulation of criminal policies by State bureaucracy. On the one hand, under strong influence of neoclassical economic thought, there appears in the United Kingdom the theory of crime normalization, qualifying the criminal act as a rational choice option, a matter of opportunity, according to which delinquents rationally calculate their actions. Such theory proposes to replace the classical model of criminal policy, which relates the penal practice to the figure of the "other", the "abnormal", by a new model of 'risk society' , which sees a professional career in criminal acts. On the other hand, there appears in the United States the movement in defense of law and order, which proposes no tolerance to crime by the amplification of penal right and the recrudescence of the State criminal answer. For the defenders of decriminalization and penal abolitionism the utopia of control society which favors the increase of punishment and target changes to administer crime ignores the existence of a society with no penalties which is manifested through the dark cipher, the difference between reported infractions to the police and those really judged.