Punitive Ideology Research Articles

Echoes from History: Women, Drug-use, and Cultural Shame

Women who use drugs continue to be mostly overlooked in research or are depicted as promiscuous and licentious. The legacy of a patriarchal past and moralistic societal attitudes still features heavily on the pathways to recovery for women. This project will focus on the structural barriers faced by women in accessing supports for alcohol and/or drug use. The aim is to explore the potential harm caused to women due to the structural and often patriarchal barriers they experience in accessing supports. Historically, drug treatment and policies have emerged from knowledge produced by a ‘male-based society’, for what was perceived to be, predominantly a ‘male problem’. Lorde asserts the ‘master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ thus male-based knowledge production will not serve women as well as it does men. The dominant culture has valued a punitive ideology of addiction that dismisses the needs of women who use drugs and fails to address the abuses perpetrated against them. Challenging this ideology, through viewing this as a feminist and human rights issue, will be the core argument within this project.

The Desirability of Law Enforcement Careers among College Students in a Hispanic Community

This study examines the effects of attitudes toward the police and punitive ideology on Hispanic criminal justice majors’ interest in law enforcement careers. To date, relatively few studies of the occupational interests of students majoring in criminal justice have been conducted and most have focused on the impact of demographic characteristics on career goals among predominantly White samples of criminal justice majors. Few scholars have questioned whether the attitudes and beliefs of criminal justice majors influence their occupational aspirations or investigated the career objectives of racial/ethnic minority criminal justice majors. This study addresses these gaps in the extant literature via an analysis of survey data collected from students attending a Hispanic-Serving Institution. A structural equation model of the data indicates the students’ age, gender, attitudes toward the police, contact with the police, and punitiveness are significantly correlated with interest in a career in law enforcement. The policy implications are discussed.

Moral Psychology as a Necessary Bridge Between Social Cognition and Law

Coordinating competing interests can be difficult. Because law regulates human behavior, it is a candidate mechanism for creating coordination in the face of societal disagreement. We argue that findings from moral psychology are necessary to understand why law can effectively resolve co-occurring conflicts related to punishment and group membership. First, we discuss heterogeneity in punitive thought, focusing on punishment within the United States legal system. Though the law exerts a weak influence on punitive ideologies before punishment occurs, we argue that it effectively coordinates perceptions of individuals who have already been punished. Next, we discuss intergroup conflict, which often co-occurs with disagreements related to punishment and represents a related domain where coordination can be difficult to achieve. Here, we underscore how insights from moral psychology can promote equality via the law. These examples demonstrate how contributions from moral psychology are necessary to understand the connection between social cognition and law.

A transnacionalização da corrupção e a instrumentalização política do processo penal

O presente artigo problematiza o entrelaçamento das cruzadas contra a corrupção e a racionalidade neoliberal, e também os reflexos produzidos por essa dinâmica sobre o processo penal, sobretudo a sua utilização como instrumento político. Tal esforço teórico justifica-se em razão do que se verificou após a Operação Lava Jato, especialmente o uso de velhos e novos discursos punitivistas visando o recrudescimento do sistema de justiça criminal e a sua influência no cenário político-governamental. Nesse sentido, partindo da premissa de que a corrupção não pode ser reduzida mediante a supressão de direitos e garantias processuais, este escrito tem como objetivo demonstrar que as campanhas anticorrupção, nos moldes conforme disseminadas desde as últimas décadas do século passado, têm servido para alavancar o projeto neoliberal e, no caso brasileiro, para obstaculizar a democratização do campo processual penal. Para tanto, mediante uma revisão bibliográfica e documental, estruturado em quatro tópicos, apresentará uma genealogia da transnacionalização da corrupção, demonstrará o vínculo das campanhas anticorrupção com os intentos neoliberais, e esmiuçará o papel decisivo desempenhado pela cruzada contra a corrupção iniciada no Brasil em 2014 para o fortalecimento dos caracteres autoritários do processo penal, bem como para o seu uso político.

От сплошного надзора к умному контролю

The article is based on the author’s presentation at the Gaidar Forum – 2020 titled ‘From Total Supervision to Smart Control: Issues of Methodology, Theory, and Practice’ in the framework of the expert discussion ‘How Regulatory Enforcement Has Changed: Citizen Perspective’. The author’s position is presented in support of the need for a consistent distinction between control and supervision, including in terms of evaluating their effectiveness, which is currently carried out virtually syncretically in relation to the control and supervision activities of the state. The article formulates the methodological and theoretical model for differentiating control and supervision, its dynamics based on the potential of digital technologies. Based on the results of analytical reports of both state structures and the expert community, the author concludes that it is necessary to adjust the regulatory framework of control and supervisory activities with a mandatory value reorientation of control and supervisory authorities from punitive ideology to the protection and maintenance of the interests of citizens and businesses. It is noted that the synergetic effect at the next stage of development of control and supervisory activities can be provided by a combination of technological and legal approaches and the ‘intersection’ of law-making and law enforcement. Expanding digitalization will allow smart control to replace comprehensive supervision, which will provide a more effective management and control system. According to the author, the practice of total, mandatory, continuous supervision will finally become a thing of the past. The basis of the new control will be a special digital plat

Valuing Emotions in Punishment: an Argument for Social Rehabilitation with the Aid of Social and Affective Neuroscience

Dominant approaches to punishment tend to downplay the socio-emotional dimension of perpetrators. This attitude is inconsistent with the body of evidence from social and affective neuroscience and its adjacent disciplines on the crucial role of emotions and emotion-related skills coupled with positive social stimuli in promoting prosocial behavior. Through a literature review of these studies, this article explores and assesses the implications that greater consideration of emotional and social factors in sentencing and correctional practices might have for conventional punitive approaches to crime. It argues that proper attention to these factors within the judgment of offending can challenge the tenets of dominant punitive ideologies and responses to crime. It further emphasizes the higher rationality and effectiveness of a paradigm of justice that aims for the social reintegration of perpetrators through a path to self-reform and change that is based on relational and inclusionary processes in the least confining environments possible to still ensure public safety. Hence, this article supports the pursuit of social rehabilitation as the ultimate goal of criminal justice.

The Problems With Prosecutors

Most scholarship on prosecutors in the United States is diagnostic, prescriptive, or both; the motivating questions are, What is the problem with prosecutors, and how do we fix it? Answering those questions has been difficult, in part because there are at least seven different problems with American prosecutors. Six of those problems are relatively familiar: the power of prosecutors, the discretion they exercise, the illegality in which they too often are found to have engaged, the punitive ideology that shapes many of their practices, their often-frustrating unaccountability, and organizational inertia within prosecutors’ offices. These problems intersect, so they are difficult to address separately. The seventh problem is discussed less often but may be the most basic: the ambiguity of the prosecutor's role. That problem needs to be understood as well if progress is to be made addressing the other six.

Analyzing Further Predictors of Correctional Officer Professional Orientations: The Role of Turnover Intentions.

Four professional orientations to which correctional officers can ascribe have been identified in extant literature, and they include the counseling roles, concern for corruption of authority, social distance, and punitive ideologies. Studies have generally found officer demographics and correctional working conditions to be significant predictors of these orientations. No study to date, however, has examined the predictive influence of officer voluntary resignation intentions. Linear regression equations using questionnaire data from a statewide population of maximum security correctional officers ( N = 649) were therefore estimated to explore whether officer desires to terminate their employment accounted for variance in their self-reported orientations. Stronger turnover intentions shared statistically significant associations with three orientations, including negatively predicting the counseling roles and positively predicting the punitive ideology. Implications for correctional policy are addressed.

Hell to pay: Religion and punitive ideology among the American public

Historically, religious frameworks—particularly conceptions of evil—have been tied to attitudes about criminal behavior and its corresponding punishment, yet views of transcendent evil have not been explored in the empirical literature on religion and punitive ideology. We examine whether and how different aspects of religiosity shape punitive attitudes, using a national sample of Americans. For both general punitiveness and views of capital punishment, belief in the existence and power of transcendent religious evil (e.g. Satan and hell) is strongly associated with greater punitiveness, while higher levels of religious practice (service attendance, prayer, and reading sacred scriptures) reduces punitiveness. The effects of other aspects of religiosity on punitiveness such as self-identified fundamentalism, scriptural literalism, and images of God are rendered spurious by accounting for perceptions of evil. We discuss these findings in light of cultural and comparative approaches to penology, arguing for the inclusion of conceptions of the “transgressive” sacred in studies of, and theories about, penal populism.

From the virgin land to the transnational identities of the twenty-first century: Exceptionalist rhetoric in the field of American studies

Abstract In the age of globalization, American Exceptionalism remains a ubiquitous subject of debate within academic circles as well as society in general. The intention of this article is to reveal the coherent narrative that accompanies the notion of exceptionalism that stretches from the ‘city upon a hill’ in the seventeenth century to the War on Terror in the early 2000s. Puritans like John Winthrop, historians like Alexis de Tocqueville and presidents like Woodrow Wilson embraced exceptionalism as a concept, but its most important base of support, other than political leaders and scholars, was America’s working class. The premise of this article is to explore the nature of this very concept, whether we call it an ideology, myth or God-given truth and why it has become such an imperative part of the political, cultural and intellectual life of the United States. By looking at the work that has been administered in the field of American studies over the last decades, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, I wish to expose the malleability of exceptionalism, a quality that not only allows it to reject any definition but also enables it to turn into a metaconcept that will never lose its appeal, according to Donald E. Pease. I argue that the manifold qualities of this metaconcept, whether we call it a political doctrine or a national fantasy, enable the citizens of the United States to define themselves within the framework of a larger American identity. I intend to highlight the problems around the United States’ self-proclaimed status as an exceptional nation in a postnational world defined by diasporic and transnational affiliations. By doing so, I will put emphasis on the punitive ideology of exclusion and demonization that surrounds the notion of American Exceptionalism.

The construction and stewardship of responsible yet precarious subjects: Punitive ideology, rehabilitation, and ‘tough love’ among parole personnel

This article examines how the diverse goals (promoting public safety, rehabilitation, and reentry) of the California parole agency function collectively, focusing on how field agents and supervisors make sense of and instantiate the agency’s mission. While these goals display fracture and can compete, the parole system displays an incorporative capacity as field personnel integrate these elements together into what they see as a coherent project. I argue that this fusion is both made possible and structured by a ‘punitive ideology’ common among field personnel that is undergirded by the construction of paroled subjects as always precarious and as responsible for their own reformation. Following this, parole personnel privilege a ‘tough love’ approach that emphasizes surveillance, sanctioning perceived misconduct, and utilizing (or threatening to utilize) reimprisonment. Yet, rather than entailing the abandonment or delegitimation of the goal of offender assistance, this approach keeps rehabilitation – as a potentiality – present through folding it within a web of punitive regulation. While this undercuts rehabilitation and reshapes it as a mechanism for surveillance and sanctioning, parole personnel view this approach as the most effective way to promote self-betterment and steward individuals towards ‘parole success’.

Turning the Other Cheek: Reassessing the Impact of Religion on Punitive Ideology

Religion has long been recognized as an underlying aspect of correctional policies. Researchers, however, have only recently begun to move beyond considerations of how fundamentalist Christian affiliations might shape preferences for punitive correctional policies. The present study broadens the extant research by examining multiple aspects of religious beliefs and how they affect support for capital punishment and harsher local courts. Analyses of General Social Survey data show that religion has divergent effects. Beyond a mere fundamentalist or conservative religious view, those who have a rigid and moralistic approach to religion and who imagine God as a dispassionate, powerful figure who dispenses justice are more likely to harbor punitive sentiments toward offenders. In contrast, those who have a gracious or loving image of God and who are compassionate toward others—that is, those who take seriously the admonition to “turn the other cheek”—are less supportive of “get tough” policies. In the end, not only is religion a multi‐dimensional phenomenon but also its features likely coalesce to divide believers into opposite camps—with one set of attributes fostering harsh sentiments toward offenders and another set of attributes tempering punitiveness and justifying interventions aimed at helping the criminally wayward.

An appraisal of punitive total institution

The justification of punishment by means of imprisonment is a phenomenon that raises concern about the structure, administration and objectives of the confinement programme. The reasons behind imprisonment as a form of confinement rest on legal function of custodial, coercive and punishment. However, the modern prison system emerged as its function changed from being primarily custodial; coercive to punitive. This paper attempts to appraise critically, the punitive ideology in total institution under the framework of Nigerian prison system, justifying its un-intentional goal of punishing offenders by means of prisons deprivation and possibly with careful examination, contribute to policy recommendations on prisons reform. African Journal for Psychological Study of Social Issues Vol. 8(1) 2005: 102-113