Contrasts in Punishment: An Explanation of Anglophone Excess and Nordic Exceptionalism, by John Pratt and Anna Eriksson, was published by Routledge in 2012. Based on research that began in 2003 and involved six countries and four languages, visits to forty prisons and interviews with fifty ‘key players’, and examination of documents going back 200 years, the book examines how long term cultural differences are reflected in contemporary approaches to crime and punishment issues in these two clusters of societies. In this seminar, John Pratt will discuss how he went about doing this research, highlighting the importance of luck, contingency and good fortune in the development of social science research projects, as much as careful planning.

This seminar is presented by Professor John Pratt, Institute of Criminology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.