Evaluating Punishment

Abstract

The evaluation of the uses and abuses of punishment cannot be simplified without losing the force of many of the arguments deployed for and against it. There are two main reasons for this. First, the concept of punishment is inherently problematic. Major complicating factors are the different perspectives on criminology, criminal justice and penology which lead to different positions from which abuses of punishment may be defined and the evaluation of punishment undertaken. Second, the notion of evaluation is ambiguous. It could refer to evaluation of the idea of punishment, or to evaluation as an outcome of evaluative research. This chapter bridges these two, for reasons which will become clearer, but can be summarised here. Essentially, this chapter straddles rather awkwardly the schism between reviewing research on whether different punishments work and evaluating punishment from various moral and ethical vantage points, some of which — moral opposition to corporal and capital punishment, for example — render experimental research into their ‘effectiveness’ irrelevant. That is to say nothing about the difficulties of deciding how to judge effectiveness.

It is very hard to predict especially the future.

(J. P. Conrad (title of chapter in Ward and Schoen, 1981, pp. 15–24))