Punishment Flashcards
Purpose of Punishment
Punishment has been proposed as a further crime prevention measure. Punishment is, by definition, a deliberate infliction of harm to others.
What ways is punishment justified?
There are different justifications for punishment and they link to different penal polices
- Reduction
- Retribution
Reduction
The justification of punishing offenders is that it prevents future crimes
- Deterrence: punishing individual discourages them from future offending. ‘making and example’ may deter public at large.
- Rehabilitation: idea that punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend (anger management)
- Incapacitation: the use of punishment to remove the offender’s capacity to offend again, such as execution
Retribution
Retribution refers to ‘paying back’. It is a justification for punishing crimes that have already been committed, rather than preventing future crimes. Based on the idea that offender’s deserve to be punished and that society is entitled to take its revenge. This is an expressive rather than an instrumental view of punishment since it expresses society’s outrage.
Durkheim: a functionalist perspective
Durkheim argues that the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values by expressing society’s moral outrage at the offence. Through rituals of order, shared values are reaffirmed and its members come to feel a sense of moral unity
Traditional Society- retributive justice
Traditional society has a strong collective conscience and solidarity between individuals, which, when offended responds with vengeful passion to repress the wrongdoer. The severity and cruelty of the motivation is purely expressive. Durkheim highlights that the purpose of punishment changes in different societies.
Modern Society- restitutive justice
In modern society, there is extensive interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this and the function of justice should be to repair the damage (e.g. through compensation). Its motivation is instrumental as it aims to restore society’s equilibrium
Marxism: Capitalism and Punishment
Punishment is part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’ that defends ruling class property against the lower classes.
The form of Punishment
The form of punishment reflects the economic base of society. As Melossi and Pavarini argue, capitalism puts a price on the workers time. Therefore imprisonment is the dominant form of punishment, since ‘time is money’, so offenders pay by ‘doing time’. Furthermore, the prison and the capitalist factory both have a similar strict disciplinary style, including subordination and loss of liberty. This shows how the economy shapes the role of punishment.
Foucault: the birth of the prison
Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’ contrasts two different forms of punishment, which he sees as examples of sovereign power and disciplinary power
Sovereign power
In pre-modern society, the monarch exercised physical power over people’s bodies and punishment was a visible spectacle, e.g. public execution
Disciplinary power
Becomes dominant from the 19th century and seeks to govern not just the body, but also the mind through surveillance. Foucault uses the panopticon to illustrate this.
The Panopticon
Is a prison design where prisoners’ cells are visible to the guards, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners. Not knowing if they are being watched means the prisoners must constantly behave as if they are. Surveillance turns into self-surveillance: control becomes invisible, ‘inside’ the prisoner.
Other self-surveillance institutions
Foucault argues that other institutions (e.g. mental asylums, factories and schools) followed this pattern and disciplinary power has now infiltrated every part of society. Although it is the nature of society which determines the functioning and form of punishment, individual members actually control themselves.
Trends in punishment- the changing role of prisons
Pre-industrial Europe had a wide range of punishments, e.g. banishment, fines and execution. Prison was used mainly for holding offenders prior to punishment. Only later was imprisonment seen as a form of punishment in itself. In liberal democracies, imprisonment is often seen as the most severe form of punishment but, as most prisoners reoffend, it may just be a way of making bad people worse.
Imprisonment today- Populist punitiveness
Since the 1980’s, there has been a move towards ‘populist punitiveness’. Politicians call for tougher sentences , leading to a rising prison population. The UK imprisons a higher proportion of people than almost any other country in Western Europe.
Era of mass incarceration (David Garland)
According to Garland, the USA and to some extent the UK, are moving into an era of mass incarceration. In the USA over 3% of the adult population now have some form of judicial restriction on their liberty.
Downes argues that mass incarceration has an ideological function, since US prisons soak up 30-40% of the unemployed, this makes capitalism look more successful. Garland argues that the reason for mass incarceration is the growing politicisation of crime control. For most of the last century, there was a consensus that punishment should reintegrate offenders into society
Transcarceration
There is a trend towards Transcarceration (moving people between different prison-like institutions), e.g. brought up in care, then a young offender’s institution, then adult prison. There has been a blurring of boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies e.g. social services are increasingly given a crime control role
Alternatives to Prison
Recently, there has been a growth in the range of community-based controls, e.g. curfews, community service orders, tagging.
Cohen argues that this has simply cast the net of control over more people. Rather than diverting young people away from the criminal justice system (CJS), community controls may divert them into it
