Tuesday, December 9, 2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

Focault's theory is that the penal system developed into a less humanitarian system. He talks about public torture in France, and how it was originally done in order to serve a few purposes. These included showing the public what happened if you were convicted of these crimes, and to punish the person who committed serious crimes. He also says that public punishment and execution served to display the power of the government. The reformists in France then created a more gentle punishment system, where convicts had to perform hard labour in order to help the community and to display the punishment they had to endure publicly. Focault finally claimed that prison was by far the most beneficial to society, claiming that they allowed the incarcerated to perform their duties in things such as government and other work.

This relates to my topic as while a lot of research I did seems to paint prisons as a bad institution and wants to focus on rehabilitation, Focault shows the benefits to having prisons in society.

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/more-subjects/criminal-justice/sentencing/theories-of-punishment

“Let the punishment fit the crime” captures the essence of retribution. Proponents advocate just deserts, which defines justice in terms of fairness and proportionality. Retributivists aim to dispense punishment according to an offender's moral blameworthiness (as measured by the severity of crimes of which the offender was convicted). Ideally, the harshness of punishments should be proportionate to the seriousness of crimes. In reality, it is difficult to match punishments and crimes, since there is no way to objectively calibrate the moral depravity of particular crimes and/or the painfulness of specific punishments. Retribution is a backward‐looking theory of punishment. It looks to the past to determine what to do in the present.

This theory says that punishment should be equal to the crime committed. It focuses on justice for the victims.

This relates to my topic because it describes the purpose of punishment as to be retribution to the victims and society for a person's actions. This is different from what I had researched which focused on the prisoners themselves.


A popular reason for punishment is that it gets criminals off the streets and protects the public. The idea is to remove an offender from society, making it physically impossible (or at least very difficult) for him or her to commit further crimes against the public while serving a sentence. Incapacitation works as long as the offenders remain locked up. There is no question that incapacitation reduces crime rates by some unknown degree. The problem is that it is very expensive. Incapacitation carries high costs not only in terms of building and operating prisons, but also in terms of disrupting families when family members are locked up.

This again relates to my topic as it focuses on viewing criminal as dangerous and that they should be put away for the benefit of society. This contrasts many view I had seen previously calling for rehabilitation.


1 comment:

  1. Very interesting stuff, and worthwhile because it highlights the different purposes or functions of prison, and the fact that different people see it totally differently. The reason I steered you to Foucault is that he, maybe more than anybody else in the past 50 years, made people think about the different ways of seeing things (not only punishment; he wrote about tons of other stuff too).

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