At the end of the last century, after two decades of neoliberal globalization, criminologists, sociologists and criminalists began to realize a strange phenomenon: crimes were decreasing and yet the prison population was increasing. Why? The reason is that policies based on security, criminal populism, were less expensive than social policies and obtained greater electoral benefits. Then came 9/11, security became the first if not the only issue for Western governments, and criminal populism morphed into political populism.
This book shows how security policies always create greater insecurity and how the "war on terror" has produced many more deaths and devastation than the very terrorism it was trying to combat.