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It is over 40 years since Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and around 35 years since she became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. By rights, her period of office ought to be confined to that 'thing' constructed as 'the past'. For, as her death in April 2013 demonstrated, her status as a key figure in contemporary British history is assured. Recent contributions attest to the importance that her governments have for us today (Vinen, 2009; Jackson and Saunders, 2012). This article contributes to that literature through an examination of her governments' criminal justice policies, specifically, the degree to which these were punitive and set Britain on the path to a punitive paradigm in criminal justice (which remains in place today). The topic of 'law and order' was one on which Thatcher accumulated much political capital, but was a topic that she actually devoted little of her own attention to. While in office, a number of commentators asserted that the Criminal Justice Acts her government had passed would lead to increased levels of punitiveness for various social groups (Wiles, 1988; Norrie and Adelman, 1989; Terrill, 1989). And a number of more recent commentators have argued that 1980s criminal justice legislation was more punitive (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007, p. 6; Faulkner, 2014, p. 89). However there are deficiencies with those literatures. Herein we pose a number of research questions aimed at exploring more systematically the degree to which the key Criminal Justice Acts of the 1980s were indeed punitive. The research questions we pose are: (i) To what degree do the Criminal Justice Acts passed by the Thatcher governments show an increase in levels of punitiveness towards the treatment of wrongdoers? ; (ii) If there was a change, was this a 'slow' gradual movement, or is a structural break identifiable (and if the latter, when did this occur)? ; and (iii) What might account for the patterns we detect?
In answering these questions, we explore, not just those Criminal Justice Acts passed between 1979 and 1990, but extend our analytical reach to include those Acts up to 1998 (by which time the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, was in office) in order to examine whether changes in punitiveness survived not just...