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This chapter explores the promise of another theory of punishment which incorporates certain elements of the deterrence, retributivist, and rehabilitation views, but whose justification for punishment and whose formula for determining what punishment a wrongdoer deserves are distinctive and importantly different from the reasons and formulas characterizing the traditional rival theories. It focuses on the theory’s application to the state’s punishment of criminal offenders and looks at the theory’s implications for punishment within other societal institutions, most notably the family. The chapter shows that this theory is promising, and merits considerably more discussion and study by the larger intellectual community. Philosophers who write about punishment spend most of their time worrying about whether the state’s punishment of criminals is justifiable, so let us begin with that particular issue. Comparing punishments to electrical fences helps to make clear how a certain kind of deterrent message is built into the larger moral point which punishment aims to convey.

Following the general rise of incarceration rates in Latin America, two general frameworks have been influential in attempting to explain the phenomenon: the neoliberal and the state transformation theses. The article takes the case of Chile, the Latin American model of neoliberal governance, to test the broad explanatory power of both frameworks. By doing so, it shows that the connection with a narrative of substitution has distortive potential. Although the Chilean case does show that investment in state capacity augmentation and output maximization mechanisms did have direct effects on incarceration rates, no change in the project of control through criminal justice can be appreciated. Rather than changing its orientation towards the type of social control it provides for, the system still stands for the traditional Latin American project of control of a large, marginalized population through confinement.

The author analyses the different ways in which the concept of ‘culture’ is currently deployed in the sociology of punishment. Using a distinction first developed by W.H. Sewell Jr, he distinguishes two usages of the concept—culture as an analytical dimension of social relations (‘the cultural’) and culture as a collective entity (‘a culture’). The theoretical issues and problems entailed in these two usages are discussed and several pragmatic solutions proposed. The author argues that analytical accounts of ‘the cultural’ should be regarded as artificial (though necessary) abstractions. Descriptive ethnography, discourse analysis and textual explication ought to be viewed as components of historical or sociological explanation, not as substitutes for explanatory analysis. The author argues for the integration of cultural analysis into the explanatory project of a multi-dimensional sociology of punishment., O autor analisa as diferentes maneiras pelas quais o conceito de “cultura” é atualmente empregado na sociologia da punição. Utilizando-se de uma distinção primeiro empregada por W. H. Sewell Jr., distingue dois usos do conceito – cultura como uma dimensão analítica de relações sociais (“o cultural”) e cultura como uma entidade coletiva (“uma cultura”). As características e problemas envolvidos nesses dois usos são discutidos e diversas soluções pragmáticas são propostas. O autor defende que narrativas analíticas do “cultural” devem ser tomadas como abstrações artificiais (embora necessárias). A etnografia descritiva, a análise de discurso e a explicação textual devem ser vistas como componentes de compreensão histórica ou sociológica, não como substitutos de uma análise compreensiva. O autor defende a integração da análise cultural em seu projeto de compreensão de uma sociologia da punição multidimensional.

The peace agreement recently concluded between the Government of Colombia and the farc-ep not only marked a milestone in the history of Colombia and peace making; it also introduced an unprecedented penal measure: negotiated criminal punishment. This example demonstrates that criminal punishment can be moulded to accommodate the needs of a society undergoing a political transition triggered by a peace negotiation. In the 1990s Garland already pointed out that penal measures are shaped by their social and historical context, and also affect their social environment. Based mainly on a sociological perspective on punishment, this article analyses the relationship between the punishment negotiated in the recent peace talks with the farc-ep and the Colombian government’s trying to come to terms with atrocities committed during the armed conflict. Based on the Colombian experience, this article also outlines contextual factors, which shape how punishment is negotiated in the context of peace agreements

The field of punishment theory promises to deal with the question of whether state punishment can be justified and on what grounds. In this field, punishment is rarely conceptualized as imprisonment. Even in the more practical subfield of sentencing theory, the realities of prison conditions rarely appear. Legal actors borrow the vocabulary of punishment and sentencing theory, proceeding as if theories speak to and justify the practice of imposing custodial sanctions and imprisonment generally. This article tries to explain how the fields of punishment and sentencing theory largely avoid the prison. The question, in a sense, is how a field can evade what is ostensibly its own subject matter. What this critique means is that sentencing authorities and other legal actors should turn away from punishment theory – or should look well beyond its boundaries – when they are thinking through the legitimacy and severity of the custodial sanctions they are imposing and administering.

This article provides an interpretation of the evolution of criminal punishment and prisons in China from an historical perspective. The historical investigation reveals that the current ganhua and paternalistic or fatherly approaches to prison corrections are expressions of an underlying cultural tradition that is deep and abiding. However, the existence of the paradoxical goals of punishment and reformation at the level of the implementation of prison sentences, which can erode the protection of the rights of prisoners, is contingent upon political and legal decisions that can be changed by acts of law and legal reform.

The number of babies in prison could be significantly reduced if the international human rights framework was monitored and implemented. There is a need to engage with sociological analysis to link this macro-level with micro-levelled policy and practice. This article has adapted Foucault’s concept of governmentality to analyse the neo-liberal rationalities of a Ministry of Justice review from England and Wales. The Covid-19 pandemic has led to critical contributions from a range of sources that are trying to protect the public (including babies in prison. In re-thinking imprisonment in the interests of babies, this article argues that the ‘art of government’ has meant that it is taken-for-granted that there is a need for mother and baby units. This article suggests an alternative economic framework is needed as a way forward for activists and criminologists who are actively engaging with the topic of babies in prison.

This chapter considers the lessons that high-profile controversies in parole in England and Wales might provide for our understanding of dominant conceptions of risk and populism in the sociology of punishment. Sparks’ (Dangerous Offenders: Punishment and Social Order. Routledge, London, 2000) earlier examination of risk and blame in a series of scandals facing English prisons in the mid-1990s is utilized as a point of comparison and a methodological sensitizing device: the former in that this provides us with a means by which to consider what might have changed in the two decades separating these high-profile episodes; the latter in that I seek, as Sparks did, to consider what insights these ‘sorry stories’ might provide for penal theory. I thus discuss broader cultural trends regarding the recognition and involvement of ‘publics’—including victims, families, prisoners and others—in penal policy. I suggest that these developments have implications for our understanding of risk and populism, and the dominant theoretical narratives that have tended to accompany conceptions of these terms.

Los últimos veinte años han visto un notable incremento en la cantidad y extensión de los estudios sobre «el castigo y la sociedad». Junto con esta expansión cuantitativa, también se han presentado importantes desarrollos cualitativos en materia de investigación, análisis e interpretación, muchos de los cuales pueden considerarse avances científicos. Este artículo especifica una serie de dimensiones en que se han mejorado la teoría, el método y los datos en el campo, y a su vez identifica algunos problemas y desafíos continuos. Se utilizan ejemplos de la literatura sobre el surgimiento del “encarcelamiento masivo” y la naturaleza de la “guerra contra las drogas” para dar cuenta del abanico de recursos teóricos que han desarrollado los académicos en este campo, y para relevar algunas preguntas empíricas y teóricas que quedan por resolver. The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in the extent and range of “punishment and society” scholarship. Together with this quantitative expansion, there have also been important qualitative developments in research, analysis and explanation – many of which can be counted as scientific advances. This article specifies a number of dimensions along which theory, method and data in this field have been improved and also identifies some continuing challenges and problems. Examples from the literature on the emergence of “mass incarceration” and the nature of the “war on drugs” are used to indicate the range of theoretical resources that scholars in this field have developed and to point to empirical and theoretical questions that remain to be resolved.

First published in 1985, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies develops a number of themes that continue to animate the research agenda of today’s sociology of punishment. This essa...

Understandings of punishment within the criminological enterprise have failed to capture the nuances associated with experiencing punishment. Moreover, mainstream academic discourses are inherently...

Both scholars and legal practitioners have long theorized that a central function of criminal punishments is to reinforce moral values and, in so doing, symbolically reaffirm the vitality of the shared beliefs that underpin social trust and bonding—or what Durkheim refers to as “mechanical solidarity”. Crime, according to this theoretical scholarship, is a symbol of disconsensus and possesses the potential to trigger a demoralization cascade. Punishment counteracts the demoralizing effect of crime by demonstrating that a consensus remains about the moral boundaries in society and that legal authorities continue to have the motivation and resources necessary to enforce this consensus. Versions of this denunciatory or expressive theory of punishment can be found in the criminological, sociological, and legal literatures. All varieties of the theory share a common feature: to date, they have largely escaped empirical scrutiny. The current study tests this theoretical tradition’s foundational hypotheses using data from a randomized factorial survey experiment conducted with a sample of 5042 Americans. The findings provide no support for expressive theories of punishment. However, the evidence does show that punishment may play an important role in reducing the emotional impact of crime on citizens. Specifically, when the offender is caught and punished it appears to diminish the aversive emotional reactions (e.g., anger) caused by learning that a crime was committed in the first place. Our study suggests that, although punishing crimes may not influence individuals’ social or moral beliefs, it might serve another important function by attenuating potentially criminogenic emotional reactions to crime, such as anger. The sanctioning effect, then, shares similarities with conventional coping mechanisms described in general strain theory.

The argument advanced in this paper is that the motivation to punish relies on punishment producing a kind of solidarity that allows individuals to pursue emotional release together with a sense of belonging, without having to question or address why it is that they felt alienated and insecure in the first place. This raises the possibility that the reason why we believe punishment to be useful, and why we are motivated to punish, is because we derive pleasure from the utility of punishment. Simply stated, punishment pleases. It then analyses the relationship between punishment and solidarity to investigate why and how punishment pleases. We argue that the pleasure of punishment is directly linked to the specific kind of solidarity that punishment produces, which we call hostile solidarity. The paper explores the links between punishment and identity in order to examine the allure of hostile solidarity and then draws implications from this perspective and sets out an agenda for future research.

Latin America has neither suffered the majority of mass atrocities in the contemporary world nor the worst of them but, after a sustained period of transition to democracy, it holds the record for the most domestic trials for human rights abuses. Argentina is an emblematic case in Latin America and the world. Due to the early development of its human rights trials, their social impact and their scale, it has a leading role in what is known as ‘the justice cascade’. Until recently, leading scholars in sociology of punishment have studied the penality of ‘ordinary crimes’ through causally deep and global narratives largely from the perspective of the Global North. State crimes and regional paths of transitional justice have been neglected in their accounts. This paper will question this state of affairs – or ‘parallelism’ – through an exploration of the punishment of both ‘common crimes’ and ‘state crimes’ in Argentina, thus contributing to the growing body of scholarship on southern criminology.

The article argues for a conception of the justification of punishment that is compatible with a modern, politically liberal regime. Section I deals with what some have thought are the obvious social interests society has in punishing criminals, and tries to develop those possible interests somewhat sympathetically. Section II suggests that many of those reasons are not good ones if punishment is regarded (as it should be) from the perspective of political philosophy. Social responses to bad things happening to people cannot be grounded in controversial metaphysical views about what is good for people or what people deserve, but many reasons proffered for punishment are in fact grounded in such views. This constraint, accordingly, limits what individuals can expect in terms of a societal response to crime. Section III develops the appropriate reasons for punishment in a modern, liberal regime. Here the article relies on a—largely undefended—conception of public reason as the most plausible theory of what ...

The crucial element in any theory of punishment is its treatment of the matter of desert. For the retributivist, desert is the sole basis on which punishment properly is imposed; he is accordingly obliged to explain how desert attaches and, more particularly, how it is translated into a measurement of punishment. Those have proved to be difficult tasks. Objectors to the retributivist position not only question whether a person can be said to be guilty in the sense required by desert. They question also whether desert, if it is a meaningful concept, by itself justifies the deliberate infliction of pain; if pain itself is not a good and no good consequences are in view, they argue, the question can have only one answer. To fortify those questions, they challenge retributivists to make their position concrete and specify what punishment attaches by way of desert to specific crimes. 1

Prison is an important and integral part of the criminal justice system in every country around the world. Used appropriately it plays a vital role in upholding the rule of law by helping to ensuring that alleged offenders are brought to justice and by providing a sanction for crimes. At best prisons should be able to offer a humane experience with opportunities for prisoners to obtain assistance and help with rehabilitation. At their worst prisons can be sites of appalling suffering, incubators of disease or mere warehouses from which prisoners return to society poorly equipped to lead a law abiding life. The prison has assumed an increasingly central role in contemporary, late modern society. In particular, Anglo-American penology has been shaped by retributive and „anti-terror‟ ideologies, where the prison is seen as the kingpin of crime control. An understanding, then, of the sociology of punishment is obvious in discerning the role of prison in contemporary society. In this scenario, there has been a substantial amount of sociological research investigating the relationship between prison in contemporary society and political discourse and viewed the role of the prison as being part of a systematic method to control certain sectors of society.

Contemporary sociologists of punishment have criticized the rising incidence of incarceration and punitiveness across the Western world in recent decades. The concepts of populist punitiveness and penal populism have played a central role in their critiques of the burgeoning penal state. These concepts are frequently sustained by a doctrine of penal elitism, which delegates a limited right to politicians and ‘the people’ to shape institutions of punishment, favoring in their place the dominance of bureaucratic and professional elites. I argue that the technocratic inclinations of penal elitism are misguided on empirical, theoretical, and normative grounds. A commitment to democratic politics should make us wary of sidelining the public and their elected representatives in the politics of punishment. A brief discussion of Norway’s legal proceedings against Nazi collaborators in the mid-1940s and the introduction sentencing guidelines commissions in Minnesota in the 1980s shows – pace penal elitism ...

While mass imprisonment is a central topic of investigation within the sociology of punishment, less is known about the prison boom – the period beginning in 1970 during which the number of US prison facilities tripled. Surprisingly, our understanding of prison impact on rural communities is minimal despite nearly 70 percent of the new facilities being constructed in rural areas. With little fanfare, prison proliferation has severely altered the physical, social, economic, and political landscape of rural America. With few exceptions, scholars fail to consider where and why prisons are built, and how these places are impacted economically, or local perceptions of these impacts. As the next steps for this research agenda have not been clearly defined, this paper serves two purposes: (i) to differentiate and redefine the contours of the prison boom from mass imprisonment and then (ii) to explore the causes and consequences of the prison boom in building a framework to conduct future research into these critical issues.

This article is about the controversial educational practice of corporal punishment – known as taibatsu in Japan – which challenged me to reflect upon my anthropological heart and find my anthropological identity. Corporal punishment is a practice around which many ideas and discourses about education, social order, human rights and even power swirl, and it is therefore an inherently sociocultural practice wherever it takes place. Like other forms of violence, it also poses a personal challenge to anthropologists who observe it in practice and have to decide whether to remain an observing bystander. At one time, I made that choice. In this article, I explain why I no longer do.

Contributions to public goods benefit all group members, yet research shows that generous group members are sometimes punished. We argue that when such antisocial punishment efforts are public, the consistency of group member contributions will encourage individuals to punish atypically generous group members. Similarly, when behavior of group members is consistent, the publicness of punishment will increase antisocial punishment. Both of these effects will be weaker for individuals who are interested in getting to know the generous deviant. We test our hypotheses in a public goods experiment and find support. Our findings contribute to the norms literature, in particular, to understanding of antisocial punishment.

This article explores the neglect of community sanctions (probation, parole etc.) in contemporary punishment and society scholarship, and seeks to understand why this part of the penal field has not attracted significant attention from researchers, despite expansion and diversification in a variety of jurisdictions. Following a review of punishment and society scholarship, which confirms the ‘Cinderella’ status of community sanctions, three arguments are proposed to help make sense of this finding. These concern the problems of language and labelling, the (in)visibility of the field and the debateable penal character of community sanctions. The article concludes with a ‘call to arms’ for punishment and society scholars, which entails recognising Cinderella as a key actor in the stories we tell about penal change, and pushing her out of the shadows of punishment and society scholarship.

Resumo Tendo por eixo o instituto previdenciário auxílio-reclusão - pago aos dependentes do segurado de baixa renda preso - e a análise das representações sociais construídas a partir dessa prática, a pesquisa enfrenta uma dimensão da complexa interface entre a questão social e as políticas penais. A investigação utilizou como campo empírico o ambiente virtual, coletando dados através das mensagens postadas em blogs ou similares. Como referenciais teóricos privilegiou as perspectivas contemporâneas da sociologia do castigo e da economia política da punição, contemplando aspectos instrumentais e simbólicos das interseções em estudo. Seus resultados constatam a peculiar repulsa social no entorno do auxílio-reclusão, o que favorece apropriações no campo jurídico e político que, emolduradas por tecnicismos e populismos punitivos, ampliam a vulnerabilidade das conquistas sociais. Abstract Focusing on the analysis of the social security system institute of Imprisonment - paid to the dependent of the insured low-income - and the analysis of the social representations that are built on it, the research faces a dimension of the complex interface between the social and criminal policies. The empirical field used in the research was the virtual environment, collecting data through messages posted on blogs or the like. As theoretical references, it privileged the contemporary perspectives of sociology of punishment and the political economy of punishment, covering instrumental and symbolic aspects of the studied intersections. Its results perceive the peculiar social revulsion concerning imprisonment-relief, which favors appropriations in the legal and political fields which, framed by technicalities and punitive populism, expand the vulnerability of the social achievements.

The article addresses the processes of neoliberal subjectivation in the field of punishment and criminalization. We first reconstruct M. Foucault's argument regarding the transformations promoted by neoliberalism in the context of punishment and its correlated modality of subjectivation. We argue that his prognosis regarding the future of normalizing institutions, such as the prison, turned out to be, in part, historically mistaken. We then proceed to explore the central argument of the article, namely, that in the past three decades, political technologies and forms of subjectivation in the sphere of punishment have been marked by reciprocal support between neoliberal and other disciplinary and sovereign mechanisms. To this end, we conduct a theoretical-analytical discussion based on empirical examples from countries such as the United States and Brazil. We aim to contribute, thus, from the sociology of punishment, to the contemporary discussion regarding the confluence between neoliberalism and authoritarianism.

This article discusses the use of law and order discourses, agents and institutions in the management of the protest. Social movement studies literature on the police management of the protest and the effects this has on mobilization is reviewed to this end. Notions from the sociology of punishment are incorporated in order to argue for the pertinence of exploring these issues in terms of processes of penalization. A complex vision of punishment is used to question the widespread understanding that there is now less violence involved in protest management: I turn to symbolic violence, and spectators as interpreters of penalization to open new lines of inquiry. To illustrate the types of situation for which these conceptual shifts might productively be applied I refer to examples of mediated political discourse, police action and presence, and the modification and application of legal texts during the last wave of protest in Spain Este artículo plantea una discusión conceptual sobre la gestión de la protesta a través de las instancias vinculadas con la ley y el orden. Para ello, primero se repasan los estudios que prestan atención a la gestión policial de la protesta y sus efectos en la movilización. Se plantea la pertinencia de usar nociones provenientes de la sociología del castigo y plantear esta cuestión en términos de procesos de penalización. Este enfo-que se usa para cuestionar la idea de que ahora hay menos violencia en la gestión de la protesta. Para ello recurro a la noción de violencia simbólica y propongo prestar más atención a los espectadores como un ob-jetivo de la penalización. Para ilustrar estas propuestas se utilizan ejemplos del discurso político mediatizado, de la actuación y presencia policial y de la modificación y aplicación de textos legales durante la última ola de protestas en España

The enterprise of the sociology of punishment rests on a reassessment of modern social theory and an appraisal of changes in patterns of crime and punishment in recent years. The emergence of a Southern criminology indicates, though, the need for repositioning knowledge production in the field of crime and crime control to include broader perspectives and theoretically accommodate new realities outside mainstream academic production. The same effort needs to address the specificity of punishment and imprisonment in this broader context. The aim of the present argument resides, thus, in developing new underpinnings for the sociology of punishment, in which the historical roots of the so-called peripheral spaces are taken seriously in their complexity and distinctiveness.

In control theory, criminal behavior is likely whenever its advantages outweigh immediate and long-term risks, as perceived by the individual. Control theory assumes that delinquent and criminal acts provide immediate and obvious benefits, or satisfaction of ordinary human desires, at little expense of time or energy. In the control theory view, small punishments, corporal or otherwise, by teaching moral lessons, function to prevent larger penalties. The standard thesis of the punishment literature is thus contrary to control theory. Corporal punishment is not excluded by this interest, but if used would be expected to be well within the limits set by modem sensibilities. For control theory, neglect is the principal cause of punishment and especially excessive punishment. The basic model of childrearing from a control theory perspective is easily described: Proper socialization of children requires that adults monitor their behavior and correct misbehavior when it occurs.

Punishment and penalties in Greece and Rome reflected major trends in ancient civilization, from archaic Greece to the later Roman Empire. Key subtopics include the family, social status, and the state; miasma (religious pollution), private and public punishment, sexual crimes, fines, shaming, exile, imprisonment, execution. Ancient sources on punishment and penalties are most full for Classical Athens, and for the Roman world from the first century BCE until the early fifth century CE. Keywords: citizenship; crime; deviance and social control; ethics; government; politics; and law; legal history; philosophy; public order; sociology

The commission of criminal wrongs is occasionally revealed after the (suspected) wrongdoer’s death. In such cases, there seems to be a widely-shared intuition, which also frequently motivates many people’s actions, that the dead should still be blamed and that some response, not only stemming from civil society but also the state, to the criminal wrong is necessary. This article explores the possibility of posthumous blame and punishment by the state. After highlighting the deficiencies of the pure versions of retributivism and general deterrence theory, but also the potential in the latter, it argues for a political theory of the criminal law (mainly from a normative perspective, although the modest claim is made in passing that current institutional arrangements are best understood in this light), which views institutions of punishment as the business not only of defendants and victims but also the political community as a whole. Within this normative scheme posthumous responses to wrongs are possible and in some cases necessary for the maintenance of the stability of the political community. Accountability-holding processes may also be possible and necessary for the protection of the reputation of the deceased suspected wrongdoer.

This article develops a new theoretical framework, penal consciousness, that examines the ways in which prisoners orient to and make meaning of their punishment. Penal consciousness identifies the processes from which penality emerges by simultaneously privileging the subjective consciousness of individual prisoners and locating this consciousness within the structure of the larger carceral system. In doing so, the penal consciousness framework moves beyond the limited, objective view of punishment as legal sanction to a more expansive view of penality that privileges subjectivity and meaning. From the inductive analysis of 80 qualitative interviews with prisoners, two dimensions of punishment emerged as key to understanding penality: salience and severity. Findings reveal that severity of punishment is predicated on the level of abstraction at which punishment is experienced, while salience of punishment is determined by the “punishment gap” between an individual’s expectations and experiences of punishment. By examining punishment as the nexus between the objective and the subjective, the penal consciousness framework enables punishment as it is understood by prisoners to differ markedly from what is conceived of as punishment by lawmakers, but at the same time to be contingent upon it. This allows punishment to be examined in situ rather than in its ideal, articulated, or abstract form—an important advancement from conventional understandings of punishment.

The standard theories of cooperation in humans, which depend on repeated interaction and reputation effects among self-regarding agents, are inadequate. Strong reciprocity, a predisposition to participate in costly cooperation and the punishment, fosters cooperation where self-regarding behaviors fail. The effectiveness of socially coordinated punishment depends on individual motivations to participate, which are based on strong reciprocity motives. The relative infrequency of high-cost punishment is a result of the ubiquity of strong reciprocity, not its absence.

This chapter develops the argument that in the lower criminal courts the process itself is the primary punishment. It identify the costs involved in the pretrial process, and examines the ways they affect organization, as well as the way a defendant will proceed on his journeys through the court. There is an elaborate multi-layered system for decision and review, there are a variety of pretrial release alternatives, and assurance of appearance at trial is the sole criterion for establishing release conditions. Although most students of the pretrial process focuses on judicial bail setting at arraignment, their observations may often miss the mark, since in many jurisdictions—including New Haven—the bulk of the pretrial release decisions is made by other people before the accused is ever presented in court. The prosecutor proposes the bail established by the police and reiterated by the bail commissioner.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, enormous changes governed U.S. punishment of criminal offenses, leading to harsher laws and longer prison terms than convicts in earlier decades served for the same offenses. The stark policy shift resulted in soaring prison populations that are disproportionate compared with most Western nations. The United States, with 5% of the world population, has more than 20% of the world’s prisoners. Its prison population rose 700% from 1970 to 2005. Today, one in 34 adults is under correctional control. The rates are disproportionate for minorities, especially less-educated black men (Lee, 2015; Pew, 2007, 2014; U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2012). Shifts in physical treatment of prisoners accompanied the population boom. Jails and prisons adopted control technologies that would likely have been considered inappropriate and inhumane decades earlier. These included the stun belt and the restraint chair, devices that can cause considerable pain. These also included extensive use of solitary confinement in Supermax prisons, an echo of a method used in 18th- and 19th -century American penitentiaries and discarded because of the dangers it posed to inmate mental health. And, following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, treatment in U.S. prisons seemed to echo overseas in abuse of foreign prisoners in American hands. The Bush administration attempted to declare physical coercion as legal during interrogations, in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions (Shane, Johnston, & Risen, 2007). What caused such a shift? Much of the change appears to be cultural in nature, connected strongly to forces such as politics, religion, pervasive beliefs about evil and children, popular culture, and economic realities. This also means that American punishment is historically more influenced by such cultural forces than by more seemingly related phenomena such as research on effective punishments, prisoner experience, or crime statistics. That American cultural trends strongly influence American punishment also means that American daily lives respond to shifts in punitiveness. Such evidence of American punishment trends appear in popular television shows and treatment of children.

Capital punishment is understood in the context of the First World War. Those executed by their own country were shot at dawn under the authority of the British Army Act 1881.

What response should the legal system make to intrafamily harm? Should these harms be classified as crimes and punished in the same amount and manner as other criminal acts? Or should there be some other type of response focusing not on the individuals who caused the harm but on the family to which they belong? Questions about the general justification of punishment, the amount and manner of punishment, and alternatives to punishment are central to the philosophy of law. In this chapter we discuss the debate between utilitarians who look to the future by justifying punishment on the grounds of deterrence and retributivists who look to the past by justifying punishment on the grounds of moral blame and desert. We examine this debate through the lens of the crime of sexual abuse of a child by its parent. We then turn to a discussion of therapy as an alternative to punishment in cases of intrafamily crime. Our question is whether there is something about intrafamily harm that would make therapy a more just response to those who cause such harms than the response of punishment.

This chapter continues to highlight the interconnection between religion and corporal punishment. It does so by a brief synopsis of the work of five pioneers in the field of education: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Horace Mann (1796–1859), Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1823), Friedrich Froebel (1792–1852), and Maria Montessori (1870–1952). Each of these educational pioneers was against corporal punishment. Their stance caused great division among religious people at the time. Some religionists provided a counterargument to the teaching of the reformers, believing that humanity was born sinful. They concluded that to beat a child was a way to rid the child of sin and to break their will. Each of the educational reformers cited subscribed to the theory of tabula rasa, believing that a child was born a blank slate and environment and nurture determined their behavior.