The Punishment-Welfare Relationship: History, Sociology, and Politics
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Description
The relationship between 'punishment' and 'welfare'—or more precisely, between a jurisdiction's penal practices and its welfare state institutions-is by now a well-established topic of theory and research in historical, sociological, and comparative studies of punishment. In recent years that relationship—and in particular the balance between penal and welfare approaches—has also become a focal point for social movements working to transform criminal justice, and more generally for activists seeking to shift power and resources away from police and prisons towards social service and public health approaches to crime control. This chapter will discuss the punishment-welfare relationship as a matter of history, sociology, and comparative social policy, and will conclude with a note on current politics, summarizing what we know, identifying promising lines of research, and commenting on key areas of contention. As a theoretical matter, I will argue that future research ought to view penal and welfare policies in relation to the underlying social problems these policies purportedly address and also in relation to the larger social and economic structures that shape these social problems and the policies that deal with them. By way of political commentary, I point to some of the considerations that should be borne in mind by activists pressing for a wholesale shift from penal to welfare modes of crime-control. I begin by discussing the relationship between punishment and welfare as it features in current research and the scholarly literature. I then turn to the question of how penal and welfare policies relate to the social problems they purport to address and to the political and socio-economic structures within which they operate. Finally, I consider the ways in which these issues are implicated in recent demands to defund the police, abolish prisons, and re-imagine public safety.
Source Publication
Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Source Editors/Authors
Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna, Lesley McAra
Publication Date
2023
Edition
7
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "The Punishment-Welfare Relationship: History, Sociology, and Politics" (2023). Faculty Chapters. 1108.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1108
