Punishment

Question 1

What are the 2 main justifications for punishment?

Answer 1

• Reduction

- Retribution

Question 2

Reduction

Answer 2

• Reduction is done through the following:
  1. Deterrence: ie ‘making an example’. Deterrence policies include Thatcher’s ‘short, sharp shock’ regime in young offenders’ institutions in the 80’s
  2. Rehabilitation: Policies include providing education and training for prisoners, anger management classes
  3. Incapacitation: In different societies this can include imprisonment, execution, cutting off people’s hands, chemical castration, American ‘three strikes and you’re out’
• This is an instrumental justification

Question 3

Retribution

Answer 3

• Based on the idea that offenders deserve to be punished, and that society is entitled to take its revenge on the offender for having breached its moral code
• Expressive justification: expresses society’s outrage

Question 4

Durkheim: Two Types of Justice

Answer 4

1. Retributive justice:
   - In traditional society there is little specialisation, and solidarity between individuals is based on their similarity to one another
   - This produces a strong collective conscience
   - Punishment is severe and cruel, and its motivation is purely expressive
2. Restitutive justice:
   - In modern society there is extensive specialisation, and solidarity is based on the resulting interdependence between individuals
   - As crime damages this interdependence, the damage is repaired through compensation

Question 5

Marxism: Capitalism and Punishment

Answer 5

• The function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order
• It is part of the ‘repressive state apparatus’- a means of defending ruling-class property against the lower classes
• Thompson: 18th century punishments such as hanging and transportation for theft and poaching were a part of a ‘rule of terror’ by the aristocracy over the poor
• Rusche and Kirchheimer: the form of punishment reflects the economic base of society
• EG: money fines are impossible without a money economy

Question 6

How do Melossi and Pavarini see imprisonment as reflecting capitalist relations of production?

Answer 6

• Capitalism puts a price on the worker’s time; prisoners ‘do time’ to ‘pay for’ their crime
• The prison and the capitalist factory both have a similar strict disciplinary style, involving subordination and loss of liberty

Question 7

Imprisonment today

Answer 7

• Prison isn’t an effective method of rehabilitation: as about 2/3 commit further crimes on release
• Since the 1980’s: a move towards ‘populist punitiveness’: politicians have sought electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences
• EG: New Labour government took the view that prison should be used not just for serious offenders, but also as a deterrent for persistent petty offenders
• As a result, the prison population has, between 1993 and 2016, almost doubled

Question 8

What are today’s figures for imprisonment compared to other countries?

Answer 8

• England and Wales: 147/100,000 people
• France: 100/100,000
• Germany: 76/100,000
• Sweden: 55/100,000
• Russia: 447/100,000
• US: 698/100,000

Question 9

The era of mass incarceration

Answer 9

• American prison numbers remained the same until the 70’s and now there are 1.5 million state and federal prisoners in prisons like Rikers Island, plus 700,000 in local jails and a further 5 million are on parole/probation etc
• While black Americans are only 13% of the population, they make up 37% of the prison population
• Downes: mass incarceration serves as an ideological function, as the US prison soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployed which makes capitalism looks successful

Question 10

Transcarceration:

Answer 10

• The idea that individuals are locked up in a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencices during their lives
• Sociologists see this cycle as a product of the blurring of boundaries between criminal justice and welfare agencies

Question 11

Alternatives to prison

Answer 11

• In the past: welfare and treatment, using non-custodial, community based controls such as probation
• Recent year: curfews, community service orders, electronic tagging
• Cohen: the growth of community controls has simply cast the net of control over more people. The increased range of sanctions available simply enables control to penetrate ever deeper into society