New Social Defense and Reflexive Modernity

This paper studies the reception of the social defense movement in Spain from a theoretical and legal perspective. Here, the influence was limited and characterized by critiques of the imprecision and lack of guarantees. However, some of its ideas are still relevant, such as its critique of a law disconnected from reality, its opposition to punishment for the sake of punishment, and its humanitarian spirit. However, social defense can play an important role nowadays as our societies experiment with deep and rapid changes, which many consider to be an expansion of criminal law. Since it depicts the criminal as an individual, social defense favors the treatment of offenders, which can be seen as a limitation to punitivism; since it insists on individual dangerousness and the identification of dangerous offenders, it can improve the expansive effect of penal intervention.