Table Of ContentThe University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Oxford University Press, Oxford
© 1990 David Garland
All rights reserved. Published 1990.
Paperback edition 1993
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 9 10 11 12 13
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-28382-1 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-28382-8 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92250-8 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Garland, David.
Punishment and modern society : a study in social theory / David Garland.
p. cm. — (Studies in crime and justice)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-226-28382-8 (paperback)
1. Punishment. I. Title. II. Series.
HV8675.G37 1990
364.6—dc20 90-6987
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-
1992.
PUNISHMENT AND MODERN SOCIETY
A STUDY IN SOCIAL THEORY
DAVID GARLAND
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Studies in Crime and Justice
For Anne
Contents
Introduction
1. The Sociology of Punishment and Punishment Today
2. Punishment and Social Solidarity: The Work of Émile Durkheim
3. Punishment and the Construction of Authority: A Reworking of Durkheimian Themes
4. The Political Economy of Punishment: Rusche and Kirchheimer and the Marxist
Tradition
5. Punishment as Ideology and Class Control: Variations on Marxist Themes
6. Punishment and the Technologies of Power: The Work of Michel Foucault
7. Beyond the Power Perspective: A Critique of Foucault on Punishment
8. The Rationalization of Punishment: Weberian Themes and Modern Penality
9. Punishment and Culture: Cultural Forms and Penal Practices
10. Punishment and Sensibilities: A Genealogy of ‘Civilized’ Sanctions
11. Punishment as a Cultural Agent: Penality’s Role in the Creation of Culture
12. Punishment as a Social Institution
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I consider myself exceptionally fortunate in having enjoyed the intellectual
stimulation and support of three excellent institutions in the space of the last
five years, and I am glad to have an opportunity to say so. A fellowship at
Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies in 1984–5
provided me with a year in which to develop my ideas, in the company of
historians who saw social theory and history as mutually enlivening
disciplines and who encouraged me to do the same. A semester’s teaching in
the spring of 1988 on the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the
University of California, Berkeley, allowed me to rehearse the book’s
arguments amidst a community of like-minded scholars and to benefit from
their thinking about the social foundations of law. Both these institutions
helped enormously in the production of the present book and I am grateful to
them for this and much besides. Above all, though, I owe thanks to my
friends and colleagues at the Centre for Criminology and the Social and
Philosophical Study of Law, here in Edinburgh. Their constant
encouragement and criticism, together with the free exchange of ideas and
argument which characterizes the Centre, make it one of the liveliest and
most rewarding settings in which to do work of this kind.
I would also like to thank a number of individuals who took the trouble to
read the entire draft manuscript, and whose extensive criticisms and
commentaries have done much to enhance the quality of what is offered here.
Beverley Brown, Stanley Cohen, Richard Ericson, James B. Jacobs, Sheldon
Messinger, and Peter Young helped in this way, as did two unnamed
publisher’s readers, and I am grateful to them all. Lydia Lawson also
deserves special thanks for the speed and alacrity with which she typed and
revised the manuscript.
Finally, and as always, I am grateful to Anne Jowett for her help and
encouragement, and it is a particular pleasure to dedicate this book to her.
The editors of the British Journal of Sociology and the ABF Research
Journal have kindly allowed material, first published in these journals, to be
reproduced in Chapters 2, 6 and 7 of the present book in a slightly revised
form.
D.G.
Introduction
The punishment of offenders is a peculiarly unsettling and dismaying aspect
of social life. As a social policy it is a continual disappointment, seeming
always to fail in its ambitions and to be undercut by crises and contradictions
of one sort or another. As a moral or political issue it provokes intemperate
emotions, deeply conflicting interests, and intractable disagreements. This
book is written in the belief that punishment puzzles us and disappoints our
expectations because we have tried to convert a deeply social issue into a
technical task for specialist institutions. It argues that the social meaning of
punishment is badly understood and needs to be explored if we are to
discover ways of punishing which better accord with our social ideals. To this
end it constructs what is, in effect, a sociology of legal punishment, drawing
upon the work of social theorists and historians who have tried to explain
punishment’s historical foundations, its social role, and its cultural
significance.
The book is thus an argument for the social approach to punishment as
well as an exposition of it. It begins by showing how the institutional
framework of modern penology tends to narrow our perceptions of the
phenomenon and obscure the social ramifications of punishment. By way of a
remedy to this, the interpretative approach of the sociology of punishment is
introduced and its main principles are described. A major part of the book is a
critical exposition of the most important theoretical perspectives in this field
and a development of the arguments which they have to offer. It thus serves
as a textbook of sorts, and my aim in this respect has been to present these
ideas lucidly and forcibly in a form which avoids simplification but is
nonetheless accessible to non-specialists. In a field which is becoming rich in
individual case-studies but lacks much in the way of sustained general
writing, this presentation of other people’s work entails a greater than usual
duty of care, and I have sought to be faithful to the arguments of the original
works even where these views diverge markedly from my own. I have also
taken care to separate exposition from critique, so that readers should be able
to disagree with me and still learn from the book.
As will quickly become apparent, the present study seeks not just to
present the sociology of punishment in a coherent form, but also to develop
that discipline by expanding its explanatory range and deepening its
interpretative power. To this end I endeavour to open up new lines of enquiry
and to explore areas of the subject which have largely been passed over by
other writers, particularly regarding the psychological attitudes which
underpin punishment and the cultural frameworks in which it exists. This
concern with the nature of punishment’s social support and its cultural
significance is a deliberate attempt to shift the sociology of punishment away
from its recent tendency—engendered by Foucault and the Marxists—to view
the penal system more or less exclusively as an apparatus of power and
control, and to recognise that criminal laws and penal institutions usually
encapsulate moral values and sensibilities that are widely shared—even if the
older Durkheimian tradition overstates the extent to which this is true. To set
out matters in this way is not to deny for one moment the obvious and
overwhelming fact that punishment revolves around the exercise of power
and control: rather it is to ask just what kind of power is involved, what are
its social meanings, the sources of its authority, the basis of its social
support?
Running throughout the book there is also a cumulative argument for the
necessity of a multidimensional interpretative approach which sees
punishment as an overdetermined, multifaceted social institution. This
conception is set out fully in the concluding chapter, where its theoretical and
practical implications are discussed. To some extent this represents a
challenge—or at least a small provocation—to other practitioners in this field
of study, since it insists that the frameworks with which they work are often
partial and limiting and that a more pluralistic approach is required. This
argument for an analytical pluralism will no doubt surprise some readers and
strike others as perfectly obvious, but it seems to me that there is a real
danger of singular—and hence reductionist—interpretations coming to
dominate in this field, and the whole animus of the present work is directed
against such an outcome.
One other cumulative argument which runs through this work—this time
directed at non-specialists—should perhaps be made explicit here in case I
have failed to make it fully apparent in the pages that follow. It seems to me
that the analyses and interpretations which are presented in this study go
some way towards demonstrating the inherent depth and complexity of
