Punishment

• Purpose of punishment

  Retribution (expressive) - paying back to society, revenge, expresses society’s outrage.

  Reduction (instrumental) - prevents future crimes through deterrence (making an example of the criminal discourages both them and others from committing crime), rehabilitation, incapacitation (remove offender’s capacity to offend again).
• Durkheim 


  Identifies two types of justice, corresponding to modern or traditional society:

  traditional - retributive justice.

  modern - restitutive justice.
• Thompson


  Marxist

  ‘rule of terror’ of aristocracy over the poor in the 18th century.
• Rusche & Kirchheimer


  Marxists

  Each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system.
• Melossi & Pavarini


  Imprisonment reflects Capitalist relations of production.
• Foucault


  Sovereign power - spectacle

  Disciplinary power - surveillance

  The panopticon - self surveillance
• The changing role of prisons

  Until 18th century, prisons used for holding offenders rather than punishing them.
• Populist punitiveness 


  Politicians seek electoral popularity by calling for tougher sentences.
• Garland 


  Systematic imprisonment -> mass incarceration
• Downes 


  Ideological function of mass incarceration.
• Transcarceration


  Individuals locked into a cycle of control.
• Alternatives to prison


  Community-based controls such as curfews, community serve orders, electronic tagging…