Social Control in Industrial Society: Garland's Punishment and Welfare

Abstract

Scholarship in the past two decades has considerably revised understanding of the penal laws and policies of industrialized western societies.' This scholarship has been above all concerned with the connections between such laws and policies and the broader apparatuses of governance, particularly as they pertain to relations between social classes.2 The scholars pursuing this line of inquiry share certain presumptions, notwithstanding many differences among them. First, that the penal laws and policies of modern western nations are informed by an intelligible (if not fully coherent, necessarily correct, or worthy) set of assumptions about what is needed to establish and maintain a tolerable degree of conformance. Second, that these assumptions shift from time to time. Finally that, because the assumptions embedded in penal policies are closely related to those underlying other state laws and policies, these shifts are useful pointers to changes in the assumptions undergirding different forms of governance tout court. This way of understanding penal change has replaced analyses treating changes in penal laws and policies as the inevitable mark of an advancing civilization; it has also supplemented those treating it as the outcome of the need to find improved ways to cope with recurrent administrative problems in the penal realm. As a result, it is now clear that a distinctive set of penal