Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective


Book Description

Bringing together new research, this book advances current theoretical understandings of punishment and control in society. It provides a critical analysis of institutions, punishment and the law, and explores the delivery of punishment and experience of incarceration in Western societies from the early-nineteenth century.




Punishment


Book Description

This 2005 book examines punishment in different forms, including corporal and economic punishment.




Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective


Book Description

This book advances current theoretical understandings of punishment and control in society, providing a critical analysis of institutions, punishment and the law.




Punishment and Social Control


Book Description

While crime, law, and punishment are subjects that have everyday meanings not very far from their academic representations, "social control" is one of those terms that appear in the sociological discourse without any corresponding everyday usage. This concept has a rather mixed lineage. "After September 11" has become a slogan that conveys all things to all people but carries some very specific implications on interrogation and civil liberties for the future of punishment and social control. The editors hold that the already pliable boundaries between ordinary and political crime will become more unstable; national and global considerations will come closer together; domestic crime control policies will be more influenced by interests of national security; measures to prevent and control international terrorism will cast their reach wider (to financial structures and ideological support); the movements of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers will be curtailed and criminalized; taken-for-granted human rights and civil liberties will be restricted. In the midst of these dramatic social changes, hardly anyone will notice the academic field of "punishment and social control" being drawn closer to political matters. Criminology is neither a "pure" academic discipline nor a profession that offers an applied body of knowledge to solve the crime problem. Its historical lineage has left an insistent tension between the drive to understand and the drive to be relevant. While the scope and orientation of this new second edition remain the same, in recognition of the continued growth and diversity of interest in punishment and social control, new chapters have been added and several original chapters have been updated and revised.




American Penology


Book Description

The purpose of American Penology is to provide a story of punishment's past, present, and likely future. The story begins in the 1600s, in the setting of colonial America, and ends in the present. As the story evolves through various historical and contemporary settings, America's efforts to understand and control crime unfold. The context, ideas, practices, and consequences of various reforms in the ways crime is punished are described and examined. Though the book's broader scope and purpose can be distinguished from prior efforts, it necessarily incorporates many contributions from this rich literature. While this enlarged second edition incorporates select descriptions and contingencies in relation to particular eras and punishment ideas and practices, it does not limit itself to individual "histories" of these eras. Instead, it uses history to frame and help explain particular punishment ideas and practices in relation to the period and context from which they evolved. The authors focus upon selected demographic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual contingencies that are associated with historical and contemporary eras to show how these contingencies shaped America's punishment ideals and practices. In offering a new understanding of received notions of crime control in this edition, Blomberg and Lucken not only provide insights into the future of punishment, but also show how the larger culture of control extends beyond the field of criminology to have an impact on declining levels of democracy, freedom, and privacy.




Discipline and Punish


Book Description

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.




Punishment and the History of Political Philosophy


Book Description

In Punishment and the History of Political Philosophy, Arthur Shuster offers an insightful study of punishment in the works of Plato, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Kant, and Foucault.




Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism


Book Description

Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism.




Social Control in Europe


Book Description

This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting -- and thus molding -- the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective. Book jacket.




Punishment and Modern Society


Book Description

In this path-breaking book, David Garland argues that punishment is a complex social institution that affects both social relations and cultural meanings. Drawing on theorists from Durkheim to Foucault, he insightfully critiques the entire spectrum of social thought concerning punishment, and reworks it into a new interpretive synthesis. "Punishment and Modern Society is an outstanding delineation of the sociology of punishment. At last the process that is surely the heart and soul of criminology, and perhaps of sociology as well—punishment—has been rescued from the fringes of these 'disciplines'. . . . This book is a first-class piece of scholarship."—Graeme Newman, Contemporary Sociology "Garland's treatment of the theorists he draws upon is erudite, faithful and constructive. . . . Punishment and Modern Society is a magnificent example of working social theory."—John R. Sutton, American Journal of Sociology "Punishment and Modern Society lifts contemporary penal issues from the mundane and narrow contours within which they are so often discussed and relocates them at the forefront of public policy. . . . This book will become a landmark study."—Andrew Rutherford, Legal Studies "This is a superbly intelligent study. Its comprehensive coverage makes it a genuine review of the field. Its scholarship and incisiveness of judgment will make it a constant reference work for the initiated, and its concluding theoretical synthesis will make it a challenge and inspiration for those undertaking research and writing on the subject. As a state-of-the-art account it is unlikely to be bettered for many a year."—Rod Morgan, British Journal of Criminology Winner of both the Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association's Crime, Law, and Deviance Section