The Nagle Report released in 1978, predicted the prison population in New South Wales (NSW) would not continue to increase proportionately to any population increase. This prediction failed to materialize due to the punitive turn which occurred in the late 1970s. Explanations for this punitive turn have referred to general changes in social, political, economic, and cultural organization rather to any specific forces confined to the criminal justice area. Over the years, different analyses have been conducted to better understand how a popular punitiveness could be constructed. This paper attempts an empirically based assessment of both transformations and continuities in the penal practices in relation to NSW, beginning from the Nagle Report to the present. The paper begins with an empirical look at post-Nagle changes and than examines how a number of theoretical arguments resting on discourse analysis fit with the empirical data. The aim is to show a disposition towards the empirical. A three-way analysis is presented: (1) empirical data on NSW penal practices post-Nagle; (2) reflections on that data at both discursive and non-discursive levels; and (3) testing theory against the data: the punitive turn, the demise of penal welfarism, and the rise of popular punitiveness. Notes, references