punishment

• reduction

  some people justify punishing offenders because it prevents future crime - instrumental role

  • deterrence - punishment discourages the individual from repeating the behaviour, while also putting off people in wider society who may have committed the same crime
  • rehabilitation - punishment can be used to reform offenders so they no longer offend
  • prisons offer training and education to give inmates a vocation upon release
  • incapacitation - removes offenders from wider society so they are physically unable to reoffend
• retribution

  a function of punishment which justifies the use of punishment for crimes that have already committed - expressive role

  • based on the idea that offenders deserve to be punished and society is entitled to take its anger out on the offender for breaching social norms
• functionalism and punishment

  durkheim - the function of punishment is to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values

  • punishment takes an expressive role as it expresses society's moral outrage
  • rituals like public trials reinforce society's shared values as people come together to condemn the offender
• functionalism - 2 types of justice

  durkheim - there are two types of justice that correspond with the two types of society

  • retributive - in traditional society there is little specialisation and people base solidarity on similarity
  • this means there is a strong collective conscience that responds to offenders with vengeful passion so punishment is severe and cruel
  • restitutive - in modern society there is extensive specialisation and solidarity is based on interdependence
  • crime damages the interdependence so it has to be restored eg. through compensation
• evaluation of functionalist view

  • traditional societies may have had restitutive justice eg. blood feuds were often settled by compensation not execution
• marxism and punishment

  the function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order, and is a repressive state apparatus

  • thompson - 18th century punishments such as hanging were part of a 'rule of terror' of the aristocracy
  • rusche + kircheimer - the form of punishment reflects the economic base of society, and each economy has its own penal system - prison being that of capitalist society
  • melossi + pavarini - inprisonmemt reflects capitalist relations
  • prisoners 'do time' to 'pay' for their crimes as there is a price put on their time
  • the prison and factory mirror one another
• the changing role of prisons

  prisons only recently became a form of punishment in themselves in the enlightenment project, before which it was purely used to hold offenders before their punishment, and now it is the most extreme punishment in liberal countries without the death penalty
• imprisonment today

  prison has proved to be an ineffective method of rehabilitation - about 2/3 of prisoners reoffend on release

  • since thatcher there has been a move towards 'populist punitiveness' - politicians seek electoral popularity by calling for tougher stances on crime
  • new labour government extended prison to repeat petty offenders
  • the prison population has reached a record size - number of prisoners almost doubled between 1993 and 2021, which has led to poor conditions for prisoners such as inadequate family visits and poor sanitation (carrabine)
  • led to the strangeways prison riot
• era of mass incarcination?

  garland - the usa and uk are moving into an era of mass incarceration, which garland argues marks the end of the incarceration of individuals and the beginning of the systematic inprisonment of whole groups

  • black americans make up 13% of the general population but 33% of the prison population
  • downes - prisons serve the ideological function of absorbing ~35% of the unemployed so capitalism appears more successful
  • garland - trend can be explained by the politicisation of crime control since the 'tough on crime' stance became popular
• transcarceration

  transcarceration - the idea that individuals become locked into a cycle of control and shift between different carceral agencies during their lives

  • someone could be brought up in care, sent to a young offenders institution and then an adult prison
  • some people see this as a product of blurring boundaries between criminal justice and social service systems
• alternatives to prison

  in the past a major goal when dealing with young offenders is diverting them away from contact with criminal justice systems to disrupt a self-fulfilling prophecy by using community-based controls like probation

  • recently there has been growth in the range of these controls eg. curfews and community service orders, but the number in custody have been growing simultaneously
  • cohen - growth of community controls has cast the net of control over more people as the increased sanctions allow control to penetrate more levels of society
  • may divert young people into prison