Punishment-centered public response to crime, disorder, and terrorism (often termed penal excess) are today bound up with other, widespread social practices of excess. The intent is to assemble a theoretical framework that can guide future empirical enquiry into this meeting of penal and social practice. The framework, it is hoped, will help shed some new light on what has been called an obsession that conditions the social relations and political life of many western societies. It will help to make sense of the attraction citizens, and political and professional actors appear to feel towards a punishment-centered idea or ideal of security that demands or promises too much. This article outlines the questions that need to be posed, and the practices that can usefully be investigated in a bid to advance empirical enquiry into this way of understanding contemporary penalty. The article begins with a discussion of how the concept of excess has been and might potentially be applied to the social analysis of crime and crime control. It then makes a case for understanding demands for security and punishment as an appetite and considers how to examine the coupling of such appetites with identity, the market and the state in ways that can shed light on the emergence of excessive, insecurity-reproducing penal practices. The article concludes with some brief reflections on corrosive, self-defeating effects of such practices and how to moderate or counteract them. References