Punishment

Punishment

Description

To punish is to impose a penalty in response to and in condemnation of a rule violation. The process of punishment is thus the deliberate imposition of some form of hard treatment and stigmatization on an agent deemed responsible for violating a norm. Penalties which lack any element of condemnation such as library fines—are not, strictly speaking, punishments. Nor are measures such as ‘preventive detention’ which are imposed on the basis of predicted future conduct rather than past offences. The status of compulsory measures of care and treatment, where these are imposed in response to deviant conduct—for instance by a juvenile court—is ambiguous. Such measures may be experienced as punitive and stigmatizing because of their context or use, even though they aim to provide help or therapy for the recipient. Punishment occurs in a variety of social contexts, and in one form or another is probably an intrinsic property of all settled forms of human association. Families, schools, workplaces, networks of friends or even nation-states all punish their deviant members from time to time, using sanctions which can range from a mild rebuke to a full-scale military assault. However, the central case of punishment in modern society is judicial punishment—the legal process whereby violators of the criminal law are sanctioned in accordance with specified legal rules and procedures, and undergo a punishment which is administered by state officials. It is thus judicial punishment which has formed the focus of attention for most modern thinking about punishment, although the behavioural effects of punishment in other contexts have been the subject of much psychological research.

Source Publication

The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought

Source Editors/Authors

William Outhwaite, Tom Bottomore

Publication Date

1993

Edition

1

Punishment

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