Sociological Perspectives on Punishment
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Description
The standard ways in which we think and talk about punishment are framed not so much by sociological theory as by two rather different discursive traditions, which might best be described as the “penological” and the “philosophical.” The first of these ways of thinking—which is as common among the lay public as it is among criminologists and criminal justice practitioners—views punishment more or less exclusively as a technique of crime control. Penal institutions and the processes of punishment are seen by penology as so many means to a fairly self-evident end: the reduction of crime rates and the restraint of individual criminals. Within this framework, the primary question is a technical one—“What works?”—and the critical tool for evaluating penal measures is the effectiveness study, which charts the impact of specific sanctions on patterns of offending and recidivism rates. Questions of “cost” are also part of the reckoning, and human costs may figure alongside financial and political ones, but the main thrust of the penological approach is to view criminal justice in instrumental terms as an apparatus whose overriding purpose is the management and control of crime. The other way of thinking that standardly shapes our understanding of penal issues is “the philosophy of punishment”—a branch of moral philosophy that flourished during the Enlightenment and that has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance, as criminologists and jurists are led to reexamine the normative foundations on which the penal system rests. This tradition sets up punishment as a distinctively moral problem, asking how penal sanctions can be justified, what their proper objectives should be, and under what circumstances they can reasonably be imposed. Its central concern is not “What works?” but rather “What is just?” and its discursive style is based on ethical reasoning and moral appeal, rather than on empirical research or technical knowledge. In recent years a third style of thinking about punishment has begun to develop and to offer a different framework for the analysis of penal issues. Instead of viewing punishment as a means to an end or a stock problem for moral philosophy, sociologists and historians have begun to conceptualize punishment as a social institution and to pose a series of questions that stem from this approach. In place of questions about punishment's effectiveness or its justification, these writers have been asking, “How do specific penal measures come into existence?” “What social functions does punishment perform?” “How do penal institutions relate to other institutions?” “How do they contribute to social order, or to state power, or to class domination, or to the cultural reproduction of society?” and “What are punishment's unintended social effects, its functional failures, and its wider social costs?” “Punishment" is thus understood as a cultural and historical artifact that may be centrally concerned with the control of crime but that is nevertheless shaped by an ensemble of social forces and has a significance and range of effects that reach well beyond the population of criminals. And the sociology of punishment—as I shall term this emergent tradition—has been concerned to explore the social foundations of punishment, to trace out the social implications of specific penal modes, and to uncover the structures of social action and webs of cultural meaning that give modern punishment its characteristic functions, forms, and effects.
Source Publication
Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Sociological Perspective
Source Editors/Authors
Charis E. Kubrin, Thomas D. Stucky
Publication Date
2013
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Sociological Perspectives on Punishment" (2013). Faculty Chapters. 656.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/656
