MUCH MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT? VICES AND VIRTUES OF PUBLICITY OF INFORMATION WITHIN THE CRIMINAL POLITICS

Abstract

Publicity is usually seen as a precondition for healthy public policy. In crime policy, however, its contribution seems to be predominantly troublesome. Based on a true episode, the paper shows how the incentives of both political organizations and information producers converge in a defective kind of publicity and an equally flawed reaction to it (section 1); next, a description of the effects of these phenomena on crime policy in the last decades is advanced (section 2); finally, pointing the main role played by symbolic legislation on this process, the paper stresses the importance of the study of legislation as a process and not just a product, and takes criminal law theory to task for not paying enough attention to it, proposing a broadening of the subject matter of our discipline (section 3)