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Does communicative retributivism necessarily negate capital punishment? My answer is no. I argue that there is a place, though a very limited and unsettled one, for capital punishment within the theoretical vision of communicative retributivism. The death penalty, when reserved for extravagantly evil murderers for the most heinous crimes, is justifiable by communicative retributive ideals. I argue that punishment as censure is a response to the preceding message sent by the offender through his criminal act. The gravity of punishment should be commensurate to the preceding criminal message, so that the offender can face up to the nature and significance of his crime. All murders are not the same. To measure up to the most evil and humanity-degrading murderous message, capital punishment should be the counter-message. Next, I argue that capital punishment does not necessarily violate human dignity. The death penalty and torture may both disrupt human dignity, yet in distinct ways. The death penalty terminates life, the vessel that holds together autonomy, while torture directly assaults autonomy. Torture is never permissible as a form of punishment. But death penalty, when used only on the extravagant evildoers, is justifiable, as life is thoroughly degraded by his own evil act. Further, I argue that mercy is integral to communicative retributivists' theory of capital punishment.

This article seeks to expose some of the implications of certain versions of pacifism for matters of criminal punishment, arguing that the plausibility of these versions of pacifism depend on the extent to which their implicit denials of certain central punishment-related concepts are themselves reasonable.

The sociology of punishment has developed a rich understanding of the social and historical forces that have transformed American penality during the last 40 years. But whereas these social forces are not unique to the United States, their penal impact there has been disproportionately large, relative to comparable nations. To address this issue, I suggest that future research should attend more closely to the structure and operation of the penal state. I begin by distinguishing penality (the penal field) from the penal state (the governing institutions that direct and control the penal field). I then present a preliminary conceptualization of “the penal state” and discuss the relationship between the penal state and the American state more generally.

The paper examines three central problems involving punitive social control in recent decades. First, the steady increase in the number of incarcerated people (the phenomenon of great confinement), with special emphasis on the Brazilian case; second, the way criminology interprets contemporary confinement (New Penology); and finally, the lack of a (dogmatic) criminal law theory on the reality of mass incarceration. Incarceration data are presented here as premises and their inevitable ethical, social and political implications, in order to inquire about the relations between the (normative-philosophical) theories regarding the justification of punishment and the (empirical) phenomena of mass incarceration. The questions behind the current reflection are therefore about what role criminal theories play in the expansion or contraction of the power to punish (potestas puniendi) and the explanations the justification models offer to the problem of hyper-punishment.

The punishment of criminal offenders constitutes a topic that has for many years received comprehensive attention, both in narrower academic circles and in broader public debate. This is not surprising. State-mandated infliction of death, suffering, or deprivation of freedom on citizens should from the outset be met with hesitation, and constitutes a practice which clearly calls for more profound considerations. Though the theoretical discussion of punishment has dealt with many conceptual and ethical issues, from an overall point of view, it is dominated by two questions. The first question, as indicated, concerns the justification of legal punishment. Why and under what conditions is it justified for the state to impose punishment on perpetrators? The traditional answers have been split between the utilitarian approach, according to which punishment can be justified in terms of its future desirable consequences, mainly crime prevention, and the retrospectively oriented retributivist approach, which justifies punishment in terms of just deserts. In the modern discussion, the picture has become more diverse. Consequentialist and retributivist justifications have been developed in many different versions and several attempts have been made to combine forward- and backward-looking considerations into coherent schemes. Moreover, genuinely new accounts of penal theories have also been presented. The second question concerns the issue of how different crimes should be punitively responded to. Though this question is obviously theoretically closely related to the first, it is also clear that the question of how individual offenders should be punished for their respective misdeeds prompts a plethora of more detailed challenges such as: What should determine the gravity of a crime? How should one determine the severity of a punishment? Are there types of punishment that should never be used in the criminal justice system (e.g., capital or corporal punishment)? Much of the contemporary discussion within penal theory is devoted to the task of providing principled solutions to these detailed challenges.

In this chapter, selected state laws regarding corporal punishment practices will be addressed. Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas were chosen because those states were either having frequent corporal punishment incidents, a larger portion of rural students, or rural ethnic minority students in its student population or showing considerable decrease on corporal punishment incidents over the years. State laws were found from the documents of U.S. Department of Education, research papers and various reports on this issue. Trends of corporal punishment in schools were presented based on national reports and documents from the National Center for Education Statistics, reports, and data from the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

Studying the methods of coercion adopted in the name of counter-terrorism is a challenge for the field of crime and punishment, precisely because it forces us to consider the meaning and limits of penality. If punishment is to be understood as a sanction imposed for breaches of the criminal law, then many of the coercive practices which are deployed in the ‘war on terror’ cannot be described as punishment. This paper explores the implications of terrorism and the recent global response - otherwise known as the ‘war on terror’ - for punishment and the field of criminal justice. It argues that various domestic and international pressures have led to a significant shift away from the punishment model in the exercise of State coercion and has, in the most extreme cases, led to the use and legitimation of State-sponsored violence.

In England and Wales, ‘punishment’ is a central element of criminal justice. What punishment entails exactly, however, and how it relates to the other aims of sentencing (crime reduction, rehabilitation, public protection and reparation), remains contested. This article outlines different conceptualizations of punishment and explores to what extent offenders subscribe to these perspectives. The analysis is supported by findings from two empirical studies on the subjective experiences of imprisonment and probation, respectively. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 male and 15 female prisoners and seven male and two female probationers. Two primary conceptualizations of punishment were identified: ‘punishment as deprivation of liberty’ and ‘punishment as hard treatment’. The comparative subjective severity of different sentences and the collateral (unintended) consequences of punishment are also discussed. It is shown that there are large individual differences in the interpretation and subjective experience of punishment, which has implications for the concept of retributive proportionality, as well as the function of punishment more generally.

This essay discusses the relation among emotions, punishment, and justice. It reviews theoretical scholarship on the role of punishment in society and sociological research on emotions, including the “emotive turn” in criminal justice and scholarship on the painful experience of incarceration. It argues that although punishment has been justified as a rational response to the problem of crime, there are emotional dimensions to its practice and function that go beyond crime. The authors suggest that the phenomenon of punishment is inherently affective, and propose that scholars of criminal justice should pursue a more rigorous study of how emotions, subjectivity, and self-identities contribute to the existence and framework of punishment in late-modern societies, in order to properly examine its role and limitations.

This article revisits Hegel’s writings on punishment to reconstruct from them a justification for the imposition of real-world penal sanctions. Tracing Hegel’s argumentative path from a bare retributive principle to his mature justification of state punishment, it argues that Hegel offers us convincing reasons for endorsing, in broad shape, the distinctive penal institutions and practices of a modern nation-state. Hegel is also right to stress that punishment is – not merely conceptually, but also in the reality of our social world – a recognition of an offender’s status as a bearer of rights and participant in a system of mutual recognition that allows us to collectively build and maintain an order of freedom. This understanding of punishment sets significant limits to punishment’s permissible forms, particularly – but not only – with regard to the death penalty. By focusing on what it means to honour an offender through punishment and by drawing attention to what legal punishment has in common with reactions to transgressions by the will more generally, I question whether the infliction of penal suffering can, as such, be a legitimate aim of penal agents. In conclusion, I argue that only a commitment to penal minimalism, developable from Hegel’s thought, can give those subjected to real-world penal sanctions a complete answer to the question why they should accept their punishment as justified.

Este trabajo recoge la evolución de la justicia penal que están recibiendo las víctimas del conflicto armado y se preguntará si el funcionalismo punitivo que se desarrolla a través de la justicia ordinaria y/o alternativa, tiene la potencialidad de ofrecer satisfacción a esta población y, en general, a la sociedad del post-conflicto; o si por el contrario, se requiere reformular la política de justicia penal de cara a forjar una paz estable. El sendero metodológico de carácter cualitativo que se utilizó, reveló la existencia de un esquema de conceptos, normas y hechos que han venido construyendo la noción de justicia para las víctimas; en todo caso, apelando a la flexibilidad en las fuentes de información y de la creatividad del investigador para encontrar objetividad y sensibilidad en los resultados. Los resultados que se erigieron permitieron ratificar la hipótesis formulada pues nos advierten que el actual funcionalismo penal que recoge el derecho a justicia es irracional y disfuncional para disuadir el delito y satisfacer los derechos de las víctimas; por ello, debe evitarse el uso del discurso de sus derechos como orientación moral de la justicia. Por lo tanto, se desnuda la necesidad de reformular la justicia penal desde una perspectiva sociológica de manera que las instituciones jurídicas aporten a la construcción de la paz para Colombia. (texto tomado de la fuente) This text collect the evolution of criminal justice that are receiving the victims of armed conflict in order to question if the functionalism of ordinary and/or alternative justice have the potential to offer satisfaction to this persons and, in general, the post-conflict society; or if it´s necessary to reformulate the criminal justice policy to get a stable peace. The methodological path of qualitative character that was used in this text, revealed the existence of a scheme of concepts, norms and facts that have been constructing the notion of justice for the victims; In any case, appealing to the flexibility in the sources of information and the creativity of the researcher to find objectivity and sensitivity in the results. That results that were established allowed us to ratify the hypothesis formulated, as they warn us that the current functionalism of the right to justice are irrational and dysfunctional to deter crime and satisfy the victims rights, for this reason, the use of the discourse of victims' rights as a moral orientation of justice should be avoided. Therefore, the need to formulate criminal justice from a sociological perspective so as to legal institutions contribute to the construction of peace for Colombia Maestría Derecho Penal

Texas is often heralded as the most punitive state in America, yet how much do we really know about the Lone Star State and its relationship with punishment? Lots of people are telling stories about Texan punishment, but what do those stories teach us? And how is the Texan punishment identity constructed both within academic scholarship and within mediated messages? This chapter seeks to answer such questions. We will begin by exploring the sociology of punishment scholarship for Texas-specific discussion and argument, and then move on to consider some statistics relating to Lone Star punishment. Once we have established this scholarly and statistical image of Lone Star justice we will examine some recent cases which have been used to highlight Texan punitiveness in the national (and international) news media, and discuss the extent to which Texan political discourse tells similar tales of a tough Texas.

After touring the punishment museums of the Lone Star State, it became clear that Texan punishment stories were often narratives of modernisation, progress and improvement. The stories rarely adhered to an event-driven plot trajectory, but many of them could nevertheless be identified as having a ‘temporally organised’ internal structure. In other words, the past was juxtaposed with the present in order to show Texan penal reform. This story of reform sought to construct punishment in the present as civilised in comparison to what came before. This chapter is designed to examine what I have termed the ‘modernisation motif’ in more detail. We will consider how and where it manifests within both the Texas Prison Museum and the jail cell tours, but more importantly we will consider what this motif tells us about Texas and its relationship with punishment.

Corporations are subject to criminal law and sentencing provisions in most legal jurisdictions in the world. This article considers how leading punishment theories apply to corporations. Corporations are, this article argues, group agents with the capacity to make moral judgments. It follows from this that retributivism, the dominant theory of punishment for moral agents, ought to be understood as a component justification of corporate punishment. However, a more fundamental problem arises in the attempt to apply punishment theory to corporations: punishment involves suffering, and corporations cannot suffer in the relevant sense. This means that corporations cannot be punished, though they can be harmed. I explore the possibilities of simply abandoning the word ‘punishment’ and creating sentences that are not at the same time punishments. This has the drawback of limiting what the criminal law can accomplish when it comes to addressing corporate malfeasance. I find that at least one practical consequence for corporate sentencing follows from this theoretical distinction: sentencers have more legitimate authority to raise upper limits for sentences for corporations than they do for individuals, though there are still principles that dictate the need for upper limits. Despite the impossibility of true punishment, the theories of retributivism, deterrence and rehabilitation are still relevant when sentencing corporations.

The cultural turn within the sociology of punishment has meant that whilst issues such as race (Young 1991), due process (Fitzpatrick 1999), American constitutional requirements (Bright 2000) and the practicalities of taking life (Denver et al. 2008) still feature, recent work has also dealt with the (re)presentation of capital punishment and the prison in film and literature (Boudreau 2006), the construction of victimhood narratives within the trial (Sarat 2002), the discourse of finding closure, usually by witnessing an execution (Bandes 2002) and the exploration of American culture with a focus on concepts such as dignity (Whitman 2003), vigilantism (Zimring 2003) and honour (Cohen and Nisbett 2004). It is this shift toward a more culturally sensitive outlook that has signalled a renewed interest in the specific culture of American punishment (Garland 2005; Steiker 2002, 2005).

With its foundations of injury, harm, and pain, the sociology of punishment is poised to give attention to the role of empathy at precisely those instances of social experience where human connection, understanding, and social knowing are destroyed, avoided, prohibited, or simply impossible. I explore this predicament through a specific case drawn from fieldwork in a geriatric prison, where institutional and intersubjective relations established by prison workers challenge empathic connections. The ‘graying’ of the prison population, one of mass incarceration’s unanticipated consequences, brings issues of pain, death, and dying to the fore. The majority of research to date on aging and dying in prison has had an important descriptive and policy orientation. There has been less of an emphasis upon the theoretical underpinnings of such a turn and the nature of intersubjective relations at the intersection of care and punishment. There have been no intensive ground-level analyses of aging in prison against the backdrop of mass incarceration in the contemporary era. This study seeks to fill that vacuum while offering a more complex understanding of the relevance and limits of empathy to the study of punishment.

Many cultures practice collective punishment; that is, they will punish one person for another's transgression, based solely on shared group membership. This practice is difficult to reconcile with the theories of moral responsibility that dominate in contemporary Western psychology, philosophy and law. Yet, we demonstrate a context in which many American participants do endorse collective punishment: retaliatory “beaning” in baseball. Notably, individuals who endorse this form of collective punishment tend not to hold the target of retaliation to be morally responsible. In other words, the psychological mechanisms underlying such “vicarious” forms of collective punishment appear to be distinct from the evaluation of moral responsibility. Consequently, the observation of collective punishment in non-Western cultures may not indicate the operation of fundamentally different conceptions of moral responsibility.

Within the sociology of punishment the hyperghetto provides a theoretical framework connecting structural and cultural linkages across mass incarceration, race, and urban disadvantage. Although this nexus is recognized as a focal point driving the prison building boom of the last 40 years, less is known about the role of rural disadvantage in this process. This is surprising given that more than 60% of the 1,600+ U.S. prison facilities are located in nonmetropolitan communities. Here, the author argues that by extending the hyperghetto we can better understand the confluences of race, punishment, and rural disadvantage in the U.S. prison-building boom. Implications for future research are as follows: first, the hyperghetto can help explain the reorganization of space in rural communities, the context of the prison-building boom, and the impact of the criminal justice system in rural communities; second, the hyperghetto provides a discursive connection between rural and urban microlevel community functions...

This article argues, in the form of demonstration, for the necessity of disciplinary openness in punishment and society scholarship. Theories about the political culture of punishment and sentimental accounts of the toll mass incarceration takes on the personal lives of millions are insufficient for developing a critical knowledge of the relationship between race, law and gender. Approaching the object of the letter unfettered by traditional disciplinary methods, the article traces the centrality of the prisoner’s letter in the lifeworld of punishment. The letter is analyzed as both itself a paper-trail, and the subject of various other forms of paper-trails, including prisoners’ First Amendment rights jurisprudence, official political rhetoric, and cinematic production.

A distinctive theory of punishment plays a central role in Smith's moral and legal theory. According to this theory, we regard the punishment of a crime as deserved only to the extent that an impartial spectator would go along with the actual or supposed resentment of the victim. The first part of this paper argues that Smith's theory deserves serious consideration and relates it to other theories such as utilitarianism and more orthodox forms of retributivism. The second part considers the objection that, because Smith's theory implies that punishment is justified only when there is some person or persons who is the victim of the crime, it cannot explain the many cases where punishment is imposed purely for the public good. It is argued that Smith's theory could be extended to cover such cases. The third part defends Smith's theory against the objection that, because it relies on our natural feelings, it cannot provide an adequate moral justification of punishment.

A crucial element of sovereignty politics concerns the role that juridical techniques play in recursively creating images of the sovereign. This paper aims to render that dimension explicit by focusing on examples of crime-focused law and colonial rule at the Cape of Good Hope circa 1795. It attempts to show how this law helped to define a colonial sovereign via such idioms as proclamations, inquisitorial criminal procedures, and case narratives framing the atrocity and appropriate punishment for crimes. Referring to primary texts of the time, the paper explores how procedures and narratives of Cape law were also deeply involved in fashioning specific images of the sovereign in whose name it claimed to operate.

All crimes in Russia are identified by the Federal Criminal Code of 1996. In 2012 the registered crime rate per capita was 1,608 per 100,000, which ranks Russia in the 50th place among other countries in the world. Leading registered crimes include theft, drug-related crimes, and fraud offences. Recorded Russian crime rates spiked during the transitional period of perestroika but started to decline after 2007. Following the dynamics of crime rates, Russia also experienced increase in the number of registered offenders and convicted persons during 1990–2007. In spite of recent decreases in crime and offenders, there is a continuous problem of growing repeat, female, and immigrant offenders. Homelessness, alcohol intoxication, and lack of stable employment also play an important role in explaining crime in Russia. Despite the country's effort to decrease custodial sentencing, its prison population is among the top ten in the world. Russia is also one of the top three countries in terms of female and pretrial imprisonment populations. Keywords: capital punishment; communism; crime statistics; Europe

Crime levels in Sweden lie around the Western European average and are also on par with those of the United States, but the structure of crime differs. Despite stable, and even decreasing, crime ra ...

Worldwide, the punishment of law violators takes many forms, with some countries relying heavily on incarceration and others favoring a mix of punishments including incarceration, corporal punishme...

The last couple of decades have seen a remarkable cultural turn in the sociology of punishment. In a field dominated by approaches emphasising class control and disciplinary power, it is no longer possible to ignore the force of representation. This article develops a cultural analysis of punishment through two iconic examples. The first is an 18th‐Century engraving by William Hogarth and the second is a 20th‐Century Andy Warhol screen print. Each sheds light on the social and political conditions existing at the time the work was produced and condensed important disputes over the meaning of punishment.

In Peculiar Institution David Garland offers a sociological explanation for Americas retention of the death penalty in an age of abolition. But the book does much more than that. Peculiar Institution appeared exactly two decades after the publication of Garlands second major study Punishment and Modern Society. In that book he laid the foundations for a multidimensional sociology of punishment. However, Garlands manifesto for a new pluralist sociology of punishment fell to a large extent on deaf ears. It is against that background that I will argue that Peculiar Institution kills two birds with one stone: in addition to its declared intention to describe and explain Americas capital punishment complex, the book can also be read as a direct intervention in a much larger debate on how we should proceed when we aim to understand punishment in all its complexity.

Canada officially abolished capital punishment in 1976. For the last few years, however, our federal government has been adopting increasingly harsher penal policies that resemble American law-and-order politics. As punishments increase in severity, there is pressure to add harsher penalties at the ‘top’ of the scale, that is, for heinous killing. Members of the federal government are almost exclusively pro-death penalty, so it seems the possibility for reinstatement is real. If the death penalty were proposed it would very likely follow on the heels of a shocking crime, and the discourse surrounding the debate will be one that exploits the emotionality of crime and punishment. In this vein, state killing will present not as a rational response to rule violation but as a necessary ritual to combat a metaphysical form of evil. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ritualistic aspects of state killing as practised in the US today, with a view to deepening our understanding of the punishment’s popular ...

Academic research on “prisoner reentry” has been heavily focused upon experimental design and program evaluation rather than broader shifts in race and class relations or underlying economic change. Deeper theoretical attention to the subaltern context of prisoner reentry would offer a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the challenges facing the highly-marginalized populations of former prisoners now increasingly the objects of “reentry” programming. This paper employs a sociology of punishment perspective to foreground recent scholarship on the prisoner reentry movement and to document the still nascent implementation of a “prisoner reentry” agenda, despite nearly two decades of effort. The paper argues that long-neglected needs of subaltern populations incarcerated over the past several decades in the United States should become a more central focus of prisoner reentry research. The paper highlights the work of several theorists to summarize three theoretical perspectives to help balance the “reentry” research agenda: prisoner reentry as neoliberal punishment; prisoner reentry as peculiar institution; and prisoner reentry as criminological scientism.

It is often said that American capital punishment fulfills no purposes, serves no functions, and possesses no coherent rationale. In Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010), David Garland argues that American capital punishment is functional, meaningful, and effective, especially in the cultural realm of death penalty discourse. He also demonstrates that America's radically local version of democracy helps explain why the death penalty has persisted in the United States long after it disappeared in other Western democracies and that many of the peculiar forms through which American capital punishment is now administered have been designed to deny association with the lynchings that have occurred in American history. Garland arrives at these conclusions by comparing capital punishment in contemporary America with death penalty systems from the American past and from other Western nations. This essay argues that comparison with Asia further illuminates what is peculiar—and ordinary—in American capital punishment.

This contribution to a symposium on Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor endorses Wacquant’s claim that the extraordinary increase in American punitiveness over the last 35 years must be seen in the context of market-friendly American neo-liberalism. However, the contribution expresses some doubt about whether American-style neo-liberalism, and American-style punishment, are likely to dominate in countries like France. American punishment practices rest on some distinctive American values, including equality of opportunity, a certain moralism in the understanding of criminal law, and a resistance to deference to expert bureaucratic authority. Because those values are less influential in the law of countries like France, the American punishment revolution is unlikely to be successfully transplanted.

Locke’s theory of punishment initially appears to be a confused combination of retributive considerations that base punishment on desert and forward-looking considerations that base punishment on future benefits. A more coherent theory emerges, however, if his argument is set in its historical context and compared with that of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. Locke rejected retributivism in all but its weakest version and grounded punishment in two distinct rationales, protection of society and restitution for victims. In doing so, Locke’s theory challenges the dichotomy between forward-looking and backward-looking rationales and contemporary conceptions of the domain of “punishment.”