Punishment and Social Solidarity

Punishment and Social Solidarity

Description

Punishment and society scholarship takes as its analytic starting point Emile Durkheim’s theory of punishment and social solidarity. It does so not because Durkheim was the first to write about criminal punishment in a sociological vein—Montesquieu (1762) and de Tocqueville (1833) initiated that project long before—but because Durkheim’s argument best encapsulates the fundamentals of the sociology of punishment and its distinctive approach to penal phenomena. Durkheim’s foundational claim—that the punishment of offenders functions not to control crime but to enhance solidarity—is by now a familiar one. In the standard textbook formulation, it can appear somewhat glib and simplistic, but properly understood, Durkheim’s theory contains within it many of the conceptual issues with which the sociology of punishment has subsequently been concerned. I will set out the argument’s details in a moment, but first I want to explain why Durkheim’s analytical approach to punishment has served as a model for so much of the scholarship in this field. Durkheim’s innovative move, his foundational contribution to this field, is to separate the sociological analysis of punishment from the conventional assumption that penal laws and penal practices are determined by the exigencies of crime-control—and to make this separation sharp and explicit. In Durkheim’s view, punishment must be understood as a moral institution, shaped by collective values and social relationships rather than an instrumental one shaped by the demands of crime-control. No doubt criminal punishments do produce crime control effects—this is, after all, their manifest function. But Durkheim insists that punishment works poorly as an instrumental technique, rarely succeeding in deterring crime or reforming offenders. The ‘true function’ of penal sanctions, whatever the perceptions of the public or the intentions of the authorities, is the ritualized re-affirmation of collective values and the reinforcement of group solidarity. Durkheim insists on the following counterintuitive claims: that punishment’s chief functions are not penal but social; that penal sanctions generally fail to inhibit offenders though they succeed in other, less apparent, respects; that the messages punishment communicates are aimed not at criminals or potential criminals but at law-abiding citizens; and that the forms and extent of punishment are determined not by crime control exigencies but by the social values, social reactions, and social organization of the group on whose behalf punishments are imposed. Taken together, these ideas have supplied the foundations for punishment and society scholarship. Proof of this is that these basic ideas, or something very like them, find expression in all the theoretical traditions that operate within this scholarly field, even when the theories are otherwise at odds with Durkheim’s own. Marxists, Foucauldians, Eliasians, Weberians, Meadians, Bourdieuians (and of course, neo-Durkheimians) all utilize these same ideational tropes. And they all begin from the axiom that punishment’s forms, functions and transformations are to be understood not (just) as an instrumental response to crime but as a constitutive aspect of larger social processes. To make this observation is not to suggest that these theories are all, in some respect Durkheimian. It is to say that they are all, in some respect, sociological, and that Durkheim was the first fully to articulate the fundamentals of a sociological approach to this phenomenon. Punishment is a social process with social causes and social effects, not—or not merely—a reaction to crime. The sociological insight here is that neither individual crimes nor aggregate crime rates determine the kind or extent of penal activity that a society undertakes. It is not ‘crime’ that dictates penal laws, penal sentences, and penal policy decisions but rather the ways in which crime is socially perceived and problematized, together with the political and administrative decisions to which these reactions give rise. Moreover, the whole apparatus of criminal justice through which this ‘reaction’ is administered—the specific forms of policing and prosecution, trial and punishment, condemnation and sanctioning, penal institutions and regime management, and so on—is shaped by social conventions and historical developments rather than by the contours of criminality. So even when penal systems adapt to changing patterns of crime and problems of crime control—and they certainly do adapt to some degree—they always do so in ways that are mediated by social norms, cultural conventions, economic resources, institutional dynamics and political forces. Durkheim’s axiom is now so thoroughly taken-for-granted in the punishment and society literature that it is sometimes rendered in exaggerated versions. One occasionally reads, for instance, that punishment and penal policy are ‘unrelated to’ or ‘utterly disconnected’ from crime and crime rates. But this is an overstatement that transforms a sociological insight into an untenable claim. The phenomenon in question is, after all, the punishment of criminal offences and offenders, and the latter (offences and offenders) always operate in some relation to the former (punishment), and always exert some pressure on punishment’s character and extent. Durkheim urged us to think of punishment as ‘relatively autonomous’ of crime (to use a concept drawn from a different tradition). He taught us to think of it as being shaped by other forces, performing other functions, and never reducible to instrumental crime control. But he did not for a moment think that punishment and crime were unrelated. On the contrary, he defined crime as deviant conduct that violates social norms to the extent of being labeled ‘crime’ and punished with a criminal sanction. Crimes, for Durkheim, are wrongful acts that violate deeply felt social norms and provoke punitive reactions. There is no punishment without crime, just as there is no crime without punishment. The relationship is mutually constitutive.

Source Publication

The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society

Source Editors/Authors

Jonathan Simon, Richard Sparks

Publication Date

2013

Punishment and Social Solidarity

Find @ NYU

Share

COinS