The components for a comparable penal expansion are in the process of emerging in some European societies, with the exception of high rates of lethal violence. These components include property crime rates that surpass those in the United States, shift in the politics of law and order toward "governing through crime" and populist punitiveness, and rising anxieties about risk and insecurity associated with ethnic minorities and crime. The distinctive character of social-democratic societies, which has so far shielded them against mass incarceration, faces further adverse comparison with the more deregulated U.S. economy in terms of unemployment rates which are significantly distorted by the size of the U.S. prison population. The author believes economic debate should be better informed of the unprecedented extent to which the penal factor exerts hidden influence on cross-national images of socioeconomic success and failure and of the costs and benefits of social-democratic relative to more deregulated market economies. 83 references and 6 notes