“Societies under Stress”: Introduction to the Special Issue*

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.