Concepts of Punishment

Abstract

This chapter aims to show how the predominance of penology in discussions of what constitutes punishment has militated against the wider consideration of other forms of punishment, outside criminal justice. To this end, it identifies the main forms of punishment; it examines the nature of punishment; it comments on the centrality of punishment, and the spread of new forms of punishment — such as punishment in the community — particularly in Western societies such as the UK and the USA; it acknowledges the need to challenge the dominance of physically and psychologically violent forms of punishment in keeping with the muscular and macho conceptualisations of crime and responses to crime which dominate criminology; it deconstructs the act of punishment and assesses the arguments for and against the use of punishment. Finally, it introduces the argument of the whole book, that whilst some punishments in theory may be justified, many are corrupted and employed abusively. Thus, while justifications may be found in principle for certain minor forms of punishment, they remain all too often flawed in practice.

a change in our attitude toward every instance of punishment… demands that we never view a punishment as something which is the obviously fitting, appropriate or deserved reaction to an offense: that we see it as, at best, a needed but nonetheless lamentable form of societal control.

(Wasserstrom, 1972, p. 341)