Punishment

What is one measure that many believe to be effective in crime prevention?

Punishment.

Given that punishment involves deliberately inflicting harm, what are the two main justifications that have been offered for it?

Reduction and retribution. These justifications link to different penal policies.

What is one justification for punishing offenders?

That it prevents future crime?

What are the different ways in which reduction can prevent future crime?

• Deterence.

• Rehabilitation.

• Incapaciation.

What happens in deterrence?

Punishing the individual discourages them from future offending. ‘Making an example‘ of them may also serve as a detterent ot the public at large.

What is rehabilitation?

The idea that punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend.

What do rehabiliation policies include?

Improving education training for prisoners so that they are able to ‘earn an honest living‘ on release, and anger management courses for violent offenders.

What is incapaciation?

The use of punishment to remove the offender’s capacity to offend again.

What do incapaciation policies in different societies include?

Imprisonment, execution, the cuttting off of hands and chemical castration.

Where has incapaciation proved increasingly popular?

With politicians, with the American ‘three strikes and you’re out policy‘ and the view that ‘prison works‘ because it removes offenders from society.

What kind of justification is reduction?

An instrumental one – punishment is a means to an end, namely crime reduction.

What does retribution mean?

‘Paying back‘. It is a justification for punishing crimes that have already been committed, rather than preventing future crimes.

What is retribution 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.

What kind of justification is retribution?

This is an expressive rather than instrumental view of punishment - it expresses society’s outrage

What do functionalists such as Durkheim argue about the function of punishment?

That it is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values. Punishment is primarily expressive - it expresses society’s emotions of moral outrage at the offence. Through rituals of order, such as public trial and punishment, society’s shared values are reaffirmed and its members come to feel a sense of moral unity.

Does punishment uphold social solidarity the same way in all societies?

No.

What does Durkheim identify?

Two types of justice, corresponding to two types of society.

Wha are the two types of justice according to Durkheim?

Retributive and restitutive justice.

In what society is retributive justice found, and what is it?

It is found in traditional society, where there is little speciation and solidarity between individuals is based on their similarity to one another. This produces a strong collective conscience, which, when offended, responds with vengeful passion to repress the wrongdoer. Punishment is severe and cruel, and its motivation is purely expressive.

In what society is restitutive justice found, and what is it?

It is found in modern society, where there is extensive specialisation, and solidarity is based on the resulting interdependence between individuals. Crime damages this interdependence, so it is necessary to repair the damage, for example through interdependence. Durkheim calls this resitutive because it aims to restore things to how they were before the offence.

What is the motivation of restitutive justice?

Instumental, to restore society’s equilibrium. Nevertheless, even in modern society, punishment still has an expressive element because it still expresses collective emotions.

In reality, what kind of justice do traditional societies often have?

Restitutive justice rather than retributive as Durkheim thought. For example, blood feuds (where a member of one clan is killed by a member of another) are often settled by payment of compensation rather than execution.

How do Marxists see society?

As divided into two classes, in which the ruling class exploits the labour of the subordinate class. They are interested in how punishment is related to the nature of class society and how it serves ruling-class interests.

For Marxists, what is the function of punishment?

To maintain th existing state order. As part of the ‘repressive state apparatus‘, it is a means of depending ruling-class property against the lower classes.

What does Thompson describe?

How in the 18th century, punishments such as hanging and transportation to the colonies for theft and poaching were part of the ‘rule of terror‘ by the landed aristocracy over the poor. This form of punishment reflects the economic base of society.

What do Rusche and Kirchheimer argue?

That each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system. For example, money fines are impossible without a money economy. They argue that under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment.

What do Melossi and Pavarinii see imprisonment as?

Reflecting capitalist relations of production. For example:

• Capitalism puts a price on the worker’s time; so too prisoners ‘do time‘ to ‘pay‘ for their time (or repay a debt to society).

• The prison and the capitalist factory both have a similar strict disciplinary style, involving subordination and loss of liberty.

What kind of punishments did pre-indsustrial Europe have?

A wide range, including warnings, banishment, transportation, corporal punishment and execution. Until the 18th century, prison was used mainly for holding offenders prior to their punishment (such as flogging). It was only following the Enlightenment project that imprisonment began to be seen as a form of punishment itself, where offenders would be ‘reformed‘ through hard labour, religious instruction and surveillance.

In liberal democracies that do not have the death penalty, what is imprisonment regarded as?

The most severe form of punishment. However, it has not proved an effective method of rehabilitation - about two-thirds of prisoners commit further crimes on release. Many critics regard prisons as simply an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Since the 1980s, what has there been a move towards?

‘Populist punitiveness‘, where politicians have sought electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences. For example, New Labour governments after 1977 took the view that prison should be used not just for serious offenders, but also as a deterrent for persistent petty offenders.

What has happened as a result of ‘populist punitiveness'?

The prison population has swollen to record size. One consequence has been overcrowing, added to existing problems of poor sanitation, barely edible food, clothing shortages, lack of educational and work opportunities, and inadequate familt visits.

Who is the prison population largely made up of?

It is largely male (only about 5% are female), young and poorly educated. Black and ethnic minorities are over-represented.

According to Garland, what is the USA, and to a lesser extent the UK moving into?

An era of mass incarceration. For most of the last century, the American prison population was stable, at around 100-120 per 100,000. In 1972, there were about 200,000 inmates in state and federal prisons.

What happened to the prison population from the 1970s?

The numbers began to rise rapidly, and there are now 1.5 million state and federal prisoners in prisons like Rikers Island, plus 700,000 in local jails. A further 5 million are under the supervision of the CJS (on parole, probation, etc). This is over three times the European rate of imprisonment, despite the fact that the rates of victimisation in the USA and Europe are about the same.

What does Garland argue about the high prison numbers?

That once figures reach these proportions ‘it ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population. In the case of the USA, the group concerned is, of course, young Black males‘.

What is an example of certain groups of people being incarcerated?

While Black Americans are only 13% of the US population, they make up 37% of the prison population. Compared with white males, black males are six times more likely to be in prison, and Hispanic and Native American males are twice as likely.

What does Downes argue?

That the US prison soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployment, therby making capitslism look more successful.

What does Garland argue about the reason for mass incarceration?

That it is the growing politicisation of crime control. For most of the last century, there was a consensus, which Garland calls ‘penal welfarism‘ - the idea that punishment should reintegrate offenders into society.

Since the 1970s, what has there been a move towards?

A new consensus based on more punitive and exclusionary ‘tough on crime‘ policies, and this has led to rising numbers in prison.

What does Simon argue?

That because drug use is so widespread, this has produced ‘an almost limitless supply of arrestable and imprisonable offenders‘.

As well as mass incarceration, what is there a trend towards?

Transcarceration – the idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control, shifting between different carceral agencies in their lives.

What is an example of transcarceration?

Someone might be brought up in care, then sent to a young offenders’ institution, then adult prison, with bouts in mental hospital between.

What do some sociologists see transcarceration as a product of?

The blurring of boundaties between criminal justice and welfare agencies. For example, health, housing and social services are increasingly being given a crime control role, and they often engage in multi-agency working with the police, sharing data on the same individuals.

In the past, what was a major goal in dealing with young offenders?

‘Diversion‘ - diverting them away from contact with the CJS to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy turning them into serious criminals. The focus was on welfare and treatment, using non-custodial, community-based controls such as probation.

In recent years, what has there been a growth in?

The range of community-based controls, such as curfews, community service orders, treatment orders and electronic tagging. However, at the same time, the numbers in custody have been rising steadily, especially among the young.

What does Cohen argue?

That the growth of community controls has simply cast the net of control over more poeple. Following Focault’s ideas, he argues that the increased range of sanctions available simply enables control to penetrate ever deeper into society.

Far from diverting young people from the CJS, what may community controls do?

Divert them into it. For example, some people argue that the police have used ASBOs as a way of fast-tracking young offenders into custodial sentences.