Towards a Social Analysis of Penality
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Description
In recent years the study of punishment has undergone a remarkable transformation. Central to this development has been a fundamental shift in what are perceived to be the basic parameters of analysis. From being a technical, administrative discipline—epitomised by the notion of penology—the study of punishment is now increasingly considered to be an area of legitimate, even central, sociological concern. Although this development is welcome - indeed it is one of the purposes of this book to record it—it should not be imagined that the resulting product exhibits the degree of internal coherence or systematic nature which would warrant heralding it as a new discipline. Rather, the infusion of social theory has followed a more complex path and, as a consequence, has thrown up a number of often competing modes of explanation. As this book demonstrates, analyses run from those inspired by the work of Foucault, to those premised in a critical reading of more standard sociological classics such as Durkheim and Marx. This state of ferment and debate is common in social science; indeed social science is by legend apparently unable to demonstrate or determine a framework which all its practitioners would hold in common. Whether this is inherent in the nature of social study or emanates from the possibly idiosyncratic proclivities of social scientists is not, for the moment, of tremendous importance. Of far greater significance is one of its ramifications which may be considered deleterious. This ferment and debate—or contestability—often subordinates what should be a central, indeed a logically prior question for any social analysis: under what conditions does its specified subject-matter become an object of knowledge? Too often, social analysis proceeds by taking it as obvious or as common sense that what it purports to investigate is naturally, and without further reflection, a genuine and self-evident object of knowledge; that social science proceeds by the gradual and ceaseless appropriation of one natural, empirical object after another. An empiricist or positivist version of social science would, of course, find such procedures perfectly respectable. Indeed, for an empiricist this is the only way of conducting true science. However, it is an irony that the very state of social science as described above, which is often most lamented by empiricists, seems to belie this version of it. The very contestability of social science suggests that its objects of knowledge are not simple reflections of naturally occurring events, but that social science creates its own objects by a process of theoretical and, we would claim, practical relevances and reflections. As a type of knowledge, social science does not advance by reproducing snapshots of reality and explaining the connection between parts of them. Rather, for us, social science is a critical discipline in as much as the knowledge that it produces is subjected to a set of theoretical and practical criteria. Moreover, the authority of the criteria does not rest upon the correspondence they have with an immutable social world. An important impetus behind the work of all major theorists has been the possibility to talk of alternative social arrangements—that the prime reason for investigating the social is the desire to change it. In this sense, all social reflection is, as Hirst claims, a type of political calculation that imagines certain effects. If this is accepted, then the crucial questions become ones defined not so much by the ‘scientific’ status of social inquiry and its ‘practical implications’, but ones surrounding the process by which objects—be they crime, punishment, law or sex—are generated as genuine fields of inquiry and the alternative social arrangements inherent and imagined in this. A central part of this process involves analysis of the conditions under which knowledge is produced, for it is only through an understanding of these conditions that it becomes possible to apprehend and assess both the status of the object—in this case, penality—as a genuine field of inquiry and to discern the nature of those alternative social arrangements envisaged.
Source Publication
The Power to Punish: Contemporary Penality and Social Analysis
Source Editors/Authors
David Garland, Peter Young
Publication Date
1983
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W. and Young, Peter, "Towards a Social Analysis of Penality" (1983). Faculty Chapters. 668.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/668
