Our interest in this subject was stimulated by the contradictions that we witnessed at a personal and local level. Perhaps the most unlikely places for neoliberal discourses to penetrate are rural communities and contradictions in policies based on neoliberal notions of individual responsibility became particularly acute when we looked through the lens of rural north Wales. The results were frequently so absurd as to be laughable, but we stopped laughing when a campaign to build a sizeable prison on the banks of the Menai Strait began in earnest, with near universal support from local politicians and the welfare services. Neoliberal penality had most certainly arrived in the UK and had taken root in the fertile soil of north Wales.

This volume draws on local, national and international sources. We finished writing this book in 2011, at a time when the UK Conservative- Liberal Democrat coalition government applied the stringent financial discipline that they promised and began to implement their programme of legislation. The pace of change is so rapid that by the time this book is published, some of the sanctions and policies that we discuss here will no longer exist. Yet the overall trend continues in the same direction – a relentlessly individualistic discourse of personal responsibility, combined with escalating levels of criminal sanction. One of us is based in north Wales and the other has close connections with the region – therefore we have selected a number of examples from Wales to illustrate the points that we make and also to show how the processes we describe are inflected and enacted differently in different areas and political cultures.