Topic 9 -Control, Punishment and Victims Flashcards
(51 cards)
what are the 2 justifications of deliberately inflicting harm as punishment?
- reduction
- retribution
explain reduction in regards to justifying punishment involving harm
- it prevents future crime through:
- deterrence- punishing individual discourages future offending
- rehabilitation- punishment can reform offenders so they no longer offend
- incapicitation- punishment that removes offenders capacity to offend e.g. execution or castration
is reduction instrumental or expressive?
instrumental
explain retribution in regards to justifying punishment involving harm
- means paying back
- rather than preventing future crimes it is the idea that offenders deserve to be punished
is retribution expressive or instrumental?
- expressive of societies outrage
what is the functionalist approach to 2 types of justice?
- retributive justice
- restitutive justice
what perspective and who had an approach of punishment of 2 types of justice?
- functionalists
- durkheim
what is retributive justice?
- a system of criminal justice based on the punishment of offenders rather than on rehabilitation.
what is restitutive justice?
- process through which parties with a stake in a specific offence collectively resolve how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future.
- restoring things to how they were before the offence
what is the marxist approach to punishment?
- the punishment of the crime should be appropriate for the acts performed.
- it should also take into account the social class of which the perpetrator is a member.
- the main purpose of punishment should be simply to ensure that society is maintained and protected.
what did rusche and kirchhemer argue about penal systems?
- each type of economy has its own corresponding penal system
- money fines are impossible without a money economy
what do melossi and pavarini say about imprisonment?
- reflects capitalist relations of production
- capitalism puts a price on workers time: prisoners do time to pay for their crime
- prison and capitalist factory have similar disciplinary styles
what are examples of sophisticated technology used in surveillance today?
- CCTV cameras,
- biometric scanning,
- automated number plate recognition,
- electronic tagging
- databases
what sociologist identified 2 types of power and what are they?
- foucault
- sovereign power
- disciplinary power
what is sovereign power?
- This was typical before the 19th century,
- monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies.
- Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body.
- Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle such as public execution.
what is disciplinary power?
- This became dominant from the 19th century.
- In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or ‘soul’.
- It does so through surveillance.
why does foucault reject the liberal view about bodily punishment and what are the 2 views?
- liberal view- societies became more civilised or humane.
- foucault- disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is a more efficient ‘technology of power’
what is an example of disciplinary power in prisons?
panopticons
what is a panoptican?
- This was a design for a prison in which each prisoner in his/her own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards are not visible to the prisoners.
- Thus the prisoners don’t know if they are being watched, but they do know that they might be being watched.
- As a result, they have to behave at all times as if they were being watched, and so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance and discipline becomes self-discipline.
how is the principle of the panoptican used today?
- The use of CCTV cameras. The UK is one of the most policed countries in terms of the high number of CCTV cameras.
- Members of society assume they are being watched by CCTV and therefore behave in an orderly manner.
explain the dispersal of discipline
- Foucault argues that the prison is just one of a range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance.
- These include mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools.
give 4 evaluations of foucault
- Foucault also exaggerates the extent of control. E.g. Goffman shows how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are able to resist controls.
- CCTV cameras are a form of panopticon – we are aware of their presence but unsure whether they are recording us. However they are not necessarily effective in preventing crime, they could just displace it.
- It may be that CCTV falsely reassures the public about their security, even though it makes little difference to their risk of victimisation.
- Feminists such as Koskela also criticise CCTV as an extension of the ‘male gaze’. While it renders women more visible to the voyeurism (sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in personal behaviours) of the male camera operator, it does not make them more secure.