Punishment and Welfare: Social Problems and Social Structures
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Description
In the sociology of punishment and comparative penology it has become common to observe significant connections between ‘punishment’ and ‘welfare’—or more precisely, between a jurisdiction's penal practices and its institutions of public assistance. In this chapter I discuss these connections and ask how they might best be understood. After reviewing the existing literature, I argue that future research ought to view the relationship between penal and welfare policy in relation to the social problems these policies purportedly address (usually thought of as ‘crime’ and ‘poverty’ respectively) and also in relation to the larger social and economic processes that shape these policies and generate these problems. These relationships are neither straightforward nor well understood, and one aim of this chapter is to introduce greater clarity into our discussions of these issues. 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 less-discussed question of how penal and welfare policies relate to the social problems that they purport to address and to the political and socio-economic structures within which they operate. The punishment-welfare connection is currently conceptualized in two rather different ways—as a historical relationship and as a comparative correlation—and I discuss each of these in turn.
Source Publication
Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Source Editors/Authors
Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna, Lesley McAra
Publication Date
2017
Edition
6
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Punishment and Welfare: Social Problems and Social Structures" (2017). Faculty Chapters. 649.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/649
