Penal-welfarism”the penal paradigm according to which crime is produced by social causes and the delinquent is capable of rehabilitation”is now discredited, having given way to large-scale imprisonment in the United States and the development of surveillance technologies and private security firms throughout the world. This paper discusses the origin of new criminologies that influence (or justify) contemporary criminal policies. It focuses on the neoclassical economic analysis of crime, which views crime as an objective nuisance and the criminal as a rational actor. According to David Garland, today there are two types of influential criminologies in the Anglo-Saxon world: the conservative criminologies that advocate the hardening of penal repression in order to deter criminals, and the “criminologies of everyday life” that focus on the daily routines that minimize the probability of criminal events. They share with neo-classical analysis the same rational choice framework, but these cannot be deduced from the economics of crime in a linear way. Nonetheless, this paper demonstrates the importance of the role of ideas in the conception of criminal policies.