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This introduction to the special issue "Societies under Stress" provides an intellectual context for the four articles that follow. The conferences at which the articles were presented brought together comparative welfare state researchers and scholars who work on crime and punishment to explore the links between social welfare and penal policy, particularly in social settings where neoliberal austerity or rising levels of criminal violence put pressure on these fields of social policy. Participants were drawn from Europe, the United States, and Latin America and represented a variety of social science disciplines and an eclectic mix of research methodologies.

This article argues that to explain American penal exceptionalism, we have to consider America's exceptional levels of punishment together with America's exceptional levels of violence and disorder, while understanding both of these as outcomes of America's distinctive political economy. After specifying the multiple respects in which American penality is a comparative outlier, the article develops a new theorization of modes of penal action that reveals the extent to which the US has come to rely on penal controls rather than other kinds of punishment. This over-reliance on penal controls is viewed as an adaptation to the weakness of non-penal social controls in American communities. These social control deficits are, in turn, attributed to America's ultra-liberal political economy, which is seen as having detrimental effects for the functioning of families and communities, tending to reduce the effectiveness of informal social controls and to generate high levels of neighborhood disorganization and violence. The same political economy limits the capacity of government to respond to these structurally generated problems using the social policy interventions characteristic of more fully developed welfare states. The result is a marked bias toward the use of penal controls.

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in the extent and range of "punishment and society" scholarship. Together with this quantitative expansion, there have also been important qualitative developments in research, analysis and explanation – many of which can be counted as scientific advances. This article specifies a number of dimensions along which theory, method and data in this field have been improved and also identifies some continuing challenges and problems. Examples from the literature on the emergence of "mass incarceration" and the nature of the "war on drugs" are used to indicate the range of theoretical resources that scholars in this field have developed and to point to empirical and theoretical questions that remain to be resolved.

La sociología del castigo desarrolló una profunda comprensión de las fuerzas sociales e históricas que transformaron la penalidad estadounidense durante los últimos 40 años. Si bien estas fuerzas sociales no son únicas de los Estados Unidos, su impacto penal allí ha sido mayor en relación a otras naciones comparables. Para dar cuenta de esta cuestión, sugiero que en el futuro la investigación social debería prestar atención más de cerca a la estructura y operación del estado penal. Voy a empezar distinguiendo la penalidad (el campo penal) del estado penal (las instituciones gobernantes que dirigen y controlan el campo penal). Luego presentaré una conceptualización preliminar del "estado penal" y discutiré, de manera más general, la relación entre el estado penal y el estadoestadounidense.

In this article Michel Foucault's method of writing a "history of the present" is explained, together with its critical objectives and its difference from conventional historiography. Foucault's shift from a style of historical research and analysis conceived as "archaeology" to one understood as "genealogy" is also discussed, showing how the history of the present deploys genealogical inquiry and the uncovering of hidden conflicts and contexts as a means of re-valuing the value of contemporary phenomena. The article highlights the critical observations of present-day phenomena from which a history of the present begins, paying particular attention to Foucault's concept of " dispositif" and his method of problematization. Foucault's analyses of Bentham's Panopticon, of the disciplinary sources of the modern prison, and of the technology of confession are discussed by way of illustration.