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” . . . 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. However, it would be quite misleading to continue to discuss the sociology of punishment as if it were a single, unified framework of thought. On closer inspection, the sociological and historical literature on punishment displays a range of theoretical approaches, analytical perspectives, and concrete interpretations that do not necessarily add up to form a single coherent or comprehensive account. Instead, what one finds is a set of competing interpretations, each one drawing on a different model of sociological explanation, each one going at the problem in a different way and for a different purpose, and each one highlighting a different characteristic of punishment and its social role. Like much of sociology, the sociology of punishment is characterized less by a settled research agenda and agreed parameters of study than by a noisy clash of perspectives and an apparently incorrigible conflict of different interpretations and varying points of view. One response to this situation has been to adopt a particular perspective—say, a Marxist approach, or a Durkheimian one—and to develop this analysis in critical disregard of other ways of proceeding. However, it is at least arguable that such an approach is less fruitful than one that tries to bring these different theoretical perspectives into conversation with one another, seeking to synthesize their interpretative strengths, to identify analyses that are complementary rather than contradictory, and to isolate specific points of disagreement so that one can endeavour to resolve them by means of further research or theoretical reflection. What I do in this essay is to survey the major sociological interpretations of punishment and to give some sense of the resources that social theory offers for the understanding of punishment. I set out a number of perspectives in turn, dealing first with the more established traditions associated with the work of Durkheim, Marx, and Foucault and then with the perspective suggested by the work of Norbert Elias . . .
Source Publication
Principled Sentencing: Readings on Theory and Policy
Source Editors/Authors
Andrew von Hirsch, Andrew Ashworth
Publication Date
1998
Edition
2
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Sociological Perspectives on Punishment" (1998). Faculty Chapters. 693.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/693
