The previous measures looked at ways of changing people’s behaviour, either by removing the need or desire for crime or by making it more difficult to do. However, one of the oldest responses has been to punish. Currently in Britain this can involve fines, community service or imprisonment. In the past, imprisonment was simply the precursor to another form of punishment but now it is an end in itself.
Punishment can be effective either instrumentally or expressively. It can either reduce crime itself or it can be retributive, expressing society’s outrage. Crime can be reduced in three separate ways. Offenders themselves are discouraged from committing future crimes because they don’t want to undergo the punishment again; Mrs Thatcher instigated the ‘short, sharp shock’ regime in young offenders’ institutions in the 1980s. Some states in America go further and make the time in prison physically unpleasant. The rest of the community is deterred because they see the result of criminality.
Prison can also bring about reform or rehabilitation of the prisoner through education, training or behaviour modification courses so that the ex-prisoner can integrate successfully into social life on release.
Prison also works because the prisoners are not free to commit crimes against the general public. America uses the ‘3 strikes’ rule to remove habitual offenders from the community. Other countries use other forms of punishment to incapacitate offenders. America also uses the death sentence, a rather permanent solution, chemical castration for sex offenders and Muslim countries, in particular, still remove the hands of thieves so they cannot steal.
At times the focus is on rehabilitation and the reduction of future crime, at others societies seem to be keener on punishment for its own sake. Offenders have breached the social code and society is allowed to take its revenge.
Functionalist hold that punishment is primarily expressive because it functions to uphold social solidarity and reinforce shared values. Through the rituals of trial and punishment , society’s shared values are reaffirmed and members feel a sense of moral unity. Durkheim believes that punishment in modern societies is restitutive, rather than retributive, because there is more interdependence between individuals and punishment aims to make restitution rather than simply avenge the crime with cruel and unusual punishment. However, it does still express and reinforce collective emotions.
Marxists view punishment more cynically. Laws are made to benefit the ruling class and punishment is designed to maintain the existing social order. It is another arm of Althusser’s repressive state apparatus. In the past, hanging and transportation were used for crimes against property as part of a ‘rule of terror’ by the landed aristocracy over the poor. Fines are only available in a money economy but Rusche and Kerchheimer argue that imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment because the capitalist economy is based on the exploitation of wage labour. The massive increase of incarceration in America has also soaked up 40% of the unemployed, ideologically making capitalism more successful.
Postmodernists have developed the idea of punishment as disciplinary power through the use of surveillance. Foucault uses the idea of the panopticon, where prisoners did not know if they were being watched because of the design of the prison. They were then required to behave at all times as if they were being watched so a situation of self-surveillance and self-discipline evolved. Control had moved away from the old days of public execution or sovereign power to one where control takes place internally.
Foucault argues that this surveillance pervades society in mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools. CCTV coverage in schools would be an example of this where pupils do not know if they are being monitored but have to behave as if they are. Foucault sees this as how power now operates in society. However, he does not consider how people resist such controls, even in prisons. He also does not consider that punishment still has an expressive role. The population still need to see offenders being punished which is why the government is refusing to allow them the right to vote.