Punishment & Society

Analyses of the consciously moral attempts to combat suicide at a women's prison via organizational innovation provide important lessons not only in the governance of women's prisons, but also in the conditionality and politics of contemporary penal probity. At the policy level they call into question the adequacy of quantitative methods for assessing staff efficiency in delivering an appropriate anti-suicide policy. In the realms of theory and penal politics they provoke an unease with studies in governmentality which give primacy to the teleological meanings of explicitly reform-oriented penal strategies. Insofar as such analyses omit to specify the points at which prevailing power relations and their conventional practices were under threat or open to challenge, they also omit to identify new configurations of resistance to penal oppression. Thus, while, on the one hand, successive studies of governmentality suggest that prevailing power relations ensure that all practices of imprisonment are inevitably illegitimate, and, on the other, successive governments continue to evaluate women's prisons according to totally inappropriate criteria, present opportunities to recognize, record and extend the genuinely therapeutic practices which reduce the damaging pain of women in penal custody will be lost. Either they will not appear in teleological depictions of an evertriumphant governmentality; or they will be suppressed by official audits looking for quantitative evidence that the prisons are `good value for money'. Possibilities for a `remoralization' of prison regimes will thereby be occluded by the mystifications of a positivist empiricism and a theoreticist social theory.

This article intends to show that the study of the Homeric epics may be useful for understanding the historical roots of our modern institutions of Criminal Justice. The Iliad and the Odyssey (both the product of an oral tradition that lasted several centuries) were written down around the middle of the 8th century BC and describe the moral values and the social life of the Greek world of that period. The social organization that they describe was not yet a polis, and the law did not exist (at least in the modern sense of the word). Nevertheless, a set of social rules existed and was basically respected. The fundamental rule was an obligation to react to any offensive behaviour by taking revenge on the offender. The sanction for not taking revenge was `losing face'. But revenge was not a free exercise of violence. It was regulated by detailed rules, some of them considered so important that if a dispute arose concerning their violation, the Council of Elders settled the dispute, acting as the first documented body of jurors in western history.

The Homeric epics, therefore, show the instruments and the effectiveness of social control in situations where a state does not exist, as well as the way - or one of the ways - in which a legal system may come into existence.

This article considers the attempt to justify punishment in terms of its ability to restore the breached rights of the crime victim. It examines the arguments put forward by Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel and contends that their theories, having followed similar patterns linguistically and stylistically, each founder though for different reasons, at the key stage of demonstrating how punishment restores rights. Kant relies upon an inappropriate analogy while Hegel resorts to an over-extended metaphor. Neither demonstrates how punishment `undoes' the wrong inherent to crime. Within the contemporary literature there is a move from punishment as the restoration of right towards punishment as the reaffirmation of right. However, the article argues that the theories following this path fail to demonstrate why punishment is necessary to the reaffirmation of right. For the above reasons, there is, as yet, no satisfactory `justificatory' link between punishment and victims' rights.

The relationship between power and resistance behind prison walls has long animated sociological discussions of imprisonment. In this article we advance a fresh understanding of resistance that recognizes the multi-faceted dimensions of prisoner agency while acknowledging the dangers in simply valorizing the strategies of the confined to subvert penal power. For us the importance of resistance is that it makes explicit the connections between everyday actions and broader inequalities. Nevertheless we identify three limitations in conventional characterizations of resistance. First it is understood as a privileged quality in the human spirit. Second, is the assumption that those who do not challenge authority accept the legitimacy of the institution. Third is the equation of resistance with rudimentary political action. Though drawing on our empirical research conducted in male and female prisons in the UK we refine the concept to overcome these limitations. In particular we indicate how social identities mediate prisoner agency and are crucially implicated in acts of contestation. Our more general ambition is to place at the centre of prison sociology the still marginalized issues of gender, race and sexuality.

Similar economic transformations, public opinion patterns, social developments and crime trends have affected most western countries over the past few decades. Punishment trends, however, whether measured in terms of imprisonment rates, average sentence lengths, preferences for or against short or long prison sentences and adoption of various forms of new community penalties vary widely. Why similar economic, social, crime and public opinion trends have such different effects on penal policy is not known. Many explanations for penal policy trends have some explanatory weight for particular countries but few are broadly generalizable.