Concepts of Culture in the Sociology of Punishment
Files
Description
Contemporary work in the sociology of punishment gives a prominent place to the concept of culture and to cultural analysis. Indeed, it has become conventional wisdom that penal institutions have important cultural dimensions and consequences and that ‘cultural factors’ are prominent in the causal determinants that shape penal policies and practices. A parallel emphasis on ‘the cultural’ is also apparent in contemporary criminology. In these respects, the sociology of crime and punishment is aligning itself with an intellectual trend that has occurred all across the humanities and social sciences—a cultural turn that seems altogether appropriate in our mass-mediated, image-saturated, late-modern world. But this embrace of ‘culture’, however timely and appropriate, threatens to introduce a degree of conceptual confusion into the field, not least because the notion of ‘culture’ is notoriously multivalent, both as a theoretical concept and as an object of analysis. The intensified interest in culture and cultural analysis is also liable to promote analyses that regard culture as an independent analytical domain rather than an integral aspect of social relations and to privilege description and explication as the primary purposes of research, thereby diverting the sociology of punishment away from the more ambitious project of social explanation.1 In this essay, I undertake an analysis of the various ways in which the concept of ‘culture’ is currently deployed in the sociology of punishment, offer a clarification of the theoretical and conceptual issues involved, and argue for the integration of cultural analysis into the explanatory project of a multi-dimensional sociology.
Source Publication
Travels of the Criminal Question: Cultural Embeddedness and Diffusion
Source Editors/Authors
Dario Melossi, Máximo Sozzo, Richard Sparks
Publication Date
2011
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Concepts of Culture in the Sociology of Punishment" (2011). Faculty Chapters. 658.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/658
