Punishment: Marxism Flashcards
Overview
The function of punishment is to maintain the existing social order. As part of Althusser’s ‘repressive state apparatus’, it is a means of helping the ruling class to maintain its dominance by force through the police, prisons, the army, etc.
It is argued that under capitalism, imprisonment becomes the dominant form of punishment because the capitalist economy is based on the exploitation of wage labour. Melossi & Pavarini (1981) argue that the prison developed in the 17th century in order to impose discipline on workers, a discipline similar to that required in factories. Workers who would not submit to factory discipline could always be sent to prison for a time, so they learned to be a subservient labour force that could be successfully exploited by the ruling class.
Rusche & Kirchheimer
Rusche & Kirchheimer argued that systems of punishment correspond to the particular economic system in which they developed. They identified 3 eras in which different systems of punishment were dominant.
(i) In the early Middle Ages, the main punishments often involved the use of fines. Workers were in high demand so it did not benefit landowners to imprison potential workers for long periods of time or to execute them.
(ii) In the later Middle Ages, brutal punishment became the norm & capital punishment (the death penalty) was used quite widely. The rich now needed to control the growing numbers of the poor & unemployed, who were a threat to social order, & the legal system was used to do this.
(iii) By the 17th century there was a shortage of labour & it was in this period that the prison developed, partly because prisoners could be used to produce goods cheaply while captive in prison, thereby helping to plug the gap in the number of workers available to the ruling class.
Capitalism
With the arrival of capitalism, prisons served the useful purposes of training workers to get used to long hours of meaninglessness work in poor conditions & of mopping up the unemployed. More recently,
Downes (2001) suggests that the US prison system soaks up about 30-40% of the unemployed, thereby making capitalism look more successful.
Furthermore, Reiman (2009) sees punishment as a way of enforcing laws that simply protect the private property of the wealthy. While the law & its application might be seen as neutral & fair to all, in reality it is the working class who are far more likely to suffer punishment, even if their behaviour does less harm to society than the behaviour of rich individuals or capitalist corporations.
A03
The approach sees punishment as only benefitting the ruling class, whereas the law (& therefore punishment) also protectsthe working-classes.
🗷 Marxists take little account of gender or ethnicity which we know affects punishment.
