9.3 Punishment

• What are the 3 roles of punishment?

  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

  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 & 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
• What are ____ 2 types of justice?

  (durkheim)

  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
• What is a criticism of Durkheim's view?

  traditional societies may have had restitutive justice eg. blood feuds were often settled by compensation not execution
• Marxism & 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

  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 - politicians seek electoral popularity by calling for tougher stances on crime

  new labour government extended prison to repeat petty offenders

  (Carrabine) 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

  led to the strangeways prison riot
• What did ___ say about mass incarceration?

  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

  e.g. black americans make up 13% of the us population but 33% of the prison population
• 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

  (Cohen)

  growth of community controls (curfews, probation & community service) has cast the net of control over more people as the increased sanctions allow control to penetrate more levels of society but the number in custody have been growing simultaneously