Does Punishment Work? Does the Evidence Matter?
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The organisers have set me two questions to address: Does punishment work? Does the evidence matter? It should be clear to everyone by now that the first question needs to be better specified if it is to be properly answered. As it stands, it would make a rather tricky exam question in a penology course, because it compels the person answering it to start at first principles and define the issues. Any student who just answered simply “yes, punishment does work” would certainly fail. He or she might well be advised to change to a career in politics. But, on the other hand, it would be very surprising if punishment did not work, in some respect or other, since institutions of punishment exist in every known society and these institutions show no signs of disappearing. On the contrary, punishment is a growing industry, both here and abroad, and seems highly impervious to recession and to public spending restraints. To a sociologist, the continued and vigorous existence of the institutions of punishment implies, at the very least, that they perform some important functions, for some groups or groups, and with a greater or lesser degree of success—although these functions may not be the ones that are commonly believed to motivate the institution, and the institutions may not serve the best interests of society as a whole. Indeed, the penology student answering this question would do well to begin by noting that the actual functions of the institution may be quite at odds with the stated purposes of those who administer and support it. Manifest functions and latent functions—objectives which are publicly proclaimed and objectives which are, in practice, actually pursued—need to be reviewed as quite separate things. And any analysis of the workings of punishment needs to bear in mind that a whole range of values and interests find some representation in the rituals and routines of punishment. The real question then, is not “does punishment work?” but is rather a series of related questions: (a) What are the precise penal and social functions that punishment serves? (b) What are the economic and political and cultural strategies in which punishment operates? (c) What are the values and group interests that are furthered by punishment in its present form? (d) To what extent, and at what cost, are these functions realised? In response to these, more detailed questions, the sociology of punishment has a lot to offer. It begins with the proposition that the punishment of offenders is much more than just a way of dealing with crime. Punishment may appear, on the face of things, to be a straightforward means to an end—an apparatus for punishing criminals and reducing crime—but it is also, as sociologists have vividly demonstrated, a number of other things besides. Punishment is also, for example, a forceful display of state power and a means of upholding the rule of law. It is a statement (and sometimes a mis-statement) of collective morality and a vehicle for emotional expression (though not always an adequate vehicle for the many and conflicting emotions that crime arouses on the part of victims and others). It can be a means for governing poor and marginal groups, sometimes a major means of doing so, as Jerome Miller suggested is happening in the USA where very large numbers of young black males are under some form of penal control. It is an economically significant industry, as Nils Christie has documented in his book Crime Control as Industry, and it is, finally, a set of symbols which displays a cultural ethos and helps create a social identity. To understand the workings of punishment in Britain—or more strikingly in the Netherlands, or Saudi Arabia, or the USA—we need to look not just at the crime problem in these countries, but also at the social structures, political processes and moral sensibilities that shape these particular penal systems and are, in turn, shaped by them. Punishment is a social institution, shaped by its history and continually interacting with strategies of power, socio-economic structures and cultural sensibilities—it is never merely a means to an end. So does punishment work? Well, yes and no. If we leave aside for the moment these wider functions, and think only of the penal and crime-reduction objectives that it pursues, there is a quite complicated picture. Our penal institutions aim to reduce crime through deterrence and reform and the incapacitation of offenders—and the performance of each of these tasks can be evaluated by reference to evidence, though such evaluation is never as straightforward as it seems. The general view of penologists is that our penal system is effective in producing a level of general background deterrence; that this basic deterrence effect (which can disappear during police strikes or periods of social disorder) depends more upon perceptions of the risk of apprehension than upon perceptions of the punishment that will be imposed; that marginal increases in the punitiveness of sentencing or penal regimes have little effect; and that levels of deterrence similar to those we now have would be sustained even if levels of punishment were to be considerably decreased.
Source Publication
Does Punishment Work?
Source Editors/Authors
James McGuire, Beverley Rowson
Publication Date
1998
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Does Punishment Work? Does the Evidence Matter?" (1998). Faculty Chapters. 691.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/691
