Punishment Regimes Research Articles

The Uses of Punishment and Exile

The European settlement of Australia from 1788 was accompanied by a prolonged dis-possession of the indigenous people, who became British subjects at law. Regimes of punishment played an important role in this dispossession. Focusing on the colonies of latest settlement, Western Australia and Queensland, the evidence here suggests also that conventional modes of punishment were modified to accommodate indigenous offending. Public execution and corporal punishment of Aborigines was practised after their exclusion as options for the settler population - but imprisonment too was shaped to the end of managing a seemingly intractable indigenous population. In completing the process of dispossession, the colonial state developed less violent punitive resources to manage the indigenous population. Incarceration within unique institutions, segregation from the settler population and surveillance and regulation through an expanding bureaucracy were strategies of social control increasingly deployed in an attempt to address the distinctive challenges posed by a dispossessed indigenous population.

Crime and Punishment in Early Republican China: Beijing's First Model Prison, 1912-1922

Prisons today are often condemned as institutions of brutal deterrence, but they were viewed as products of benevolence and producers of goodness across the globe during most of the nineteenth and twentieth century. 1 A cathedral of modernity, the prison was embraced by local notables, county magistrates, government officials, legal experts, and political elites around the world from Paris to Rio de Janeiro and Auburn to Tokyo. Changing sensibilities towards pain, new representations of bodily integrity, humanitarian values heralded by Enlightenment thinkers, utilitarian ideas about punishment as a corrective measure, growing dissatisfaction with existing legal penalties, and revulsion at the conditions of existing jails combined towards the end of the eighteenth century in England and France to create a new conception of the prison as a total institution in which the wicked criminal could be reformed into a good citizen. While commitment to social improvement and faith in the malleable nature of humankind pervaded these early debates, the most important factor in the emergence of the prison was the political revolutions of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. During the French revolution, the fall of the Bastille symbolized the defeat of an entire ancient regime of punishment perceived to be cruel and arbitrary. A post-revolutionary mode of governance, in which legitimacy was vested in the nation rather than in a king, based its authority to punish on a code of law. Moreover, as the social hierarchies specific to traditional regimes were theoretically swept away by a new ideology of equality and fraternity, the state proclaimed a duty of care over its subjects: criminals should be punished in a humane way before being restituted to the social body. The idea of the reformative prison--producer of obedient citizens for a moral community based on the rule of law--paralleled the rise of [End Page 140] the modern state and the extension of political rights. Russia, for instance, opted for rehabilitation over corporal punishment during the era of Great Reforms, undertaking to redeem the nation's criminals in a new prison system, 2 while prison reform was embraced by the Meiji reformers in Japan after 1868. These global developments were dynamically interrelated: portraying their mission as a fight against "barbarism" and "inhumanity," prison reformers around the world operated within a comparative framework in which prison reform was seen as an indicator of a nation's "progress." The dungeon stood as an embarrassing reminder of backwardness, while the prison epitomized civilisation. Corporal punishment, arbitrary justice, and corrupt gaols were remnants of an old world, while reformed judicial systems, legal codes, and modern prisons were indicative of a new political order.

Optimal antitrust policy under different regimes of fines

This paper shows how antitrust laws against price-fixing can be enforced efficiently in the presence of asymmetric information between the authorities and the industry, and under different regimes of pecuniary punishment. We consider two regimes of fines that are often used in practice. The first involves a fine based on revenues of the industry while the second is related to the damage caused to consumers. The analysis shows that since investigation is costly, it is optimal from a welfare point of view to tolerate some degree of collusion in both cases. Comparing the deterrence levels, we show that no regime is a priori better than the other. In addition, we show that for industries where the possibilities of collusion are small, the first system dominates the second in terms of efficiency. Conversely, for high possibilities of collusion, the second system is better.

Michel Foucault: Regimes of Punishment and the Question of Liberty

‘Sex abuse’ has recently become an object of knowledge of the human sciences and thereby, juridical punishment. While not diminishing the problem of sexual violence, this paper explains the intensification of the sexual abuse discourse as contingent upon an incitement to talk about it in a ‘confessional society’. The paper argues that notions such as ‘normality’, ‘deviance’ and therefore (ab)use, are produced by power and are, consequently, contestable. It examines the ways that under the current punitive disciplinary rationality, there is an imperative of continuous production of knowledge that incites the sex abuse discourse. In a liberal society, failure to determine such knowledge is a threat to liberty and thereby, liberalism itself.

Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Political economies of punishment 2. 'New histories of punishment regimes 3. The Foucault Effect: from penology to penality 4. Feminist analytical approaches to women's imprisonment 5. Postmodern feminism and the question of penalty 6. Towards a postmodern penal politic? Bibliography

The Prison and the Factory; Origins of the Penitentiary System

Editors' IntroductionThis is the first appearance in English of an Italian work which has become one of the seminal books in its field, and which has been influential in shaping recent Marxist studies of social discipline and control. The Prison and the Factory, like Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, has become a much cited but largely unavailable text for those working in the field of deviance and social control. Because of the attention which The Prison and the Factory has attracted, we believe it to be important to provide a translation for English-speaking audiences. A second reason for publishing this work is to extend more widely the interest that has been generated by more recent work by Dario Melossi which has become available in English.The Prison and the Factory is where Melossi and Pavarini established their fundamental arguments concerning the interrelationship between the development of capitalist accumulation and forms of punishment and discipline. These arguments have become a basis for increasing exploration and debate in this area, which has merged a variety of different academic starting points: in law, sociology and history. This focus of interest has been manifested in recent work in Britain, in organisations such as the National Deviancy Conference and the Conference of Socialist Economists; in the USA, particularly through Crime and Social Justice, as well as in other European countries through the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, and La Questione Criminale.In more general terms, the work of Melossi and Pavarini coincides with a major expansion of interest in historical criminology: for example, in the work of Hay, Linebaugh and Thompson. As Melossi and Pavarini themselves point out in their Introduction, one particularly sharp focus of this move to historical analysis has been the relationship between the crisis of prison systems and the attempt to unearth the social and historical origins of those institutions. It has become increasingly apparent that in all Western societies, the penal system, no matter what its specific national form, is failing in its selfproclaimed tasks of rehabilitation and deterrence. One of the responses to this 'crisis' has been the attempt to excavate the real nature of the connection between prisons and social structures. As such, he prison has emerged as one of the key sites for analysing the relation between social regimes and forms of discipline and regulation. Melossi and Pavarini's entry to this debate follows the direction established in Rusche and Kirchheimer's pioneering work, Punishment and Social Structure. The Prison and the Factory reconsiders and develops the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer in examining the relation between modes of production and modes of punishment. The specific form of this project in The Prison and the Factory is the analysis of the connection between the genealogy of capitalism and the genealogy of the penal institution. The prison as a specific form of punishment is located within the emergence of capitalist social relations and the development of generalised labour. It is this development which they argue produces a regime of punishment based on the deprivation of liberty.Within this analysis, Melossi and Pavarini provide a synoptic tracing of the shifts and developments in penal regimes in relation to changes in the process of capital accumulation and the problems of the regulation of labour associated with that process. This work deals with the early stages of capitalist development through the specific national forms which this development took in a number of European States and in North America. The Prison and the Factory thus lays the foundation for major investigations of the relationship between capitalist modes of production and their apparatuses of social discipline and control.