Frameworks of Inquiry in the Sociology of Punishment
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Giving a proper name to an entity can often make it seem more substantial or more unified than it actually is, so perhaps my title's reference to ‘the sociology of punishment’ needs to be put in perspective. I take the sociology of punishment to be that body of thought which explores the relations between punishment and society, its purpose being to understand legal punishment as a social phenomenon and thus trace its role in social life. Seen in these terms, the sociology of punishment is not a long-standing or well-developed tradition of social thought. Until quite recently there was only a handful of genuinely sociological studies focusing upon punishment, and of these, only the work of Durkheim was able to make any serious impression upon sociological thinking. The modern discipline of sociology has not chosen to use penal institutions as a focus for its researches or as a basis for its theoretical reflections, and this despite the early examples of Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, both of whom demonstrated the significance of punishment as a topic of social inquiry. To the extent that punishment found a place in the social sciences prior to the 1970s, it was as a subject for penologists, who tended to approach the matter as an administrative or technical issue rather than as a sociological one. Only occasionally did the writings of thinkers such as Mead, Garfinkel, Sykes and Goffman remind us of the wider meanings of society's punitive measures. In the last fifteen years or so things have begun to change. Studies of penal institutions now stand at the centre of a lively and expanding literature which highlights the role played by penality in the construction of political order, the furtherance of state control, and the constitution of individuals as social subjects. Historians, philosophers, sociologists, criminologists, even literary scholars, have been moved to explore the realm of legal punishment and to recover the insights and illuminations which it has to offer about our social world. As a consequence, the area is beginning to realize some of its potential as an intellectually stimulating field of inquiry where what is at stake is not just the workings of penal policy (important as that is) but also the working of society and its social institutions. One of the key events which helped stimulate this resurgence of interest in the sociology of punishment was undoubtedly the publication in the mid-1970s of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. On the one hand, Foucault's work demonstrated to a wide audience of historians and social theorists the far-reaching sociological significance of punishment and the kinds of insights which might be gained from a close examination of its practices. On the other, it connected with the concerns of many sociologically-inclined criminologists who had already begun to develop a skeptical critique of modem criminalizing processes—using interactionist or radical theories of deviance—and who found in Foucault's work a more powerful set of tools for the analysis of state control. Discipline and Punish seemed to fit perfectly with the theoretical and ideological concerns of many writers who were studying the agencies of penal regulation, and its assimilation gave their work a theoretical refinement and an apparent political importance which it had not had before. Given the centrality of Foucault's thought to the emergence of contemporary work in the sociology of punishment, it is no surprise to find that Foucauldian conceptions and descriptions now stand at the very heart of this literature. Key Foucauldian terms such as ‘discipline’, ‘surveillance’, ‘power-knowledge’ and ‘normalization’ are now routinely used and debated, while more familiar ideas—such as ‘the widening of the net’ of penal regulation, or the spread of ‘soft social control’ are now articulated through a Foucauldian language. Since 1975 the meaning of welfare sanctions, the functioning of the modem prison and the significance of classification and assessment have all been reconceptualized in the literature in ways which are deeply indebted to Foucault's ideas. By and large, this has been a positive influence. It has raised the level of theoretical discussion and widened the range of work being done. But precisely because the sociology of punishment is an underdeveloped tradition, there is a danger that the influence of one powerful perspective can dominate thinking in a way which is intellectually constraining and ultimately counterproductive. Already one can discern a tendency to subsume the analysis of punishment within a skeptical ‘sociology of control’ in which the main concern is to reveal the ways in which punishments embody or enhance the regulatory power of the state and social institutions. And while these texts are often interesting and valuable in themselves, it seems to me that this particular 'way of seeing' renders invisible many important aspects of the phenomenon. The present paper is an attempt to point up some of the limitations of the perspective which has grown up in the wake of Foucault's work and to argue that an understanding of punishment will require a wider, more flexible, and more multidimensional framework than that suggested by Discipline and Punish.
Source Publication
Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments
Source Editors/Authors
Barry Smart
Publication Date
1995
Volume Number
IV
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Frameworks of Inquiry in the Sociology of Punishment" (1995). Faculty Chapters. 700.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/700
