State Punishment Research Articles

Punishment, Welfare and Gender Ordering in Queensland, 1920–1940

This study investigates the relationships between penality (or official approaches to punishment) and welfare thinking that emerged in Queensland in the interwar years. Penality came to focus upon concerns about gender ordering and, in particular, those conceptions of “familied” masculinity and femininity which (supposedly) enhanced human wellbeing and social stability during a time of economic and social distress. Yet while state punishment selectively sanctioned and worked towards reinforcing particular masculine and feminine constructs, the “correctional” outcomes for various categories of male and female offenders in terms of their lived experiences were very different: determined not only by gender but also along lines of age and family arrangements. Three major strands of penal philosophy — the domestic, work ethic and medical approaches — coexisted between the wars and their overlap, seen perhaps more clearly in the case of women, compounded the gendered nature of ‘penality as welfare’. Attention to specific regimes in the social history of punishment reminds us of the need to appreciate the often complex interplay between systems of punishment and welfare.

Restorative justice: ideas, values, debates

Restorative justice is one of the most talked about developments in the field of crime and justice. Its advocates and practitioners argue that state punishment, society's customary response to crime, neither meets the needs of crime victims nor prevents reoffending. In its place, they suggest, should be restorative justice, in which families and communities of offenders encourage them to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, express repentance and repair the harm they have done. First published in 2002, Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates is renowned worldwide as an accessible, balanced and invaluable analysis of the argument that restorative justice can provide an attractive alternative to traditional responses to crime. The second edition includes a new chapter identifying and analyzing fundamental shifts and developments in restorative justice thinking over the last decade. It suggests that the campaign for restorative justice has not only grown rapidly in the last decade, but has also changed in its focus and character. What started as a campaign to revolutionize criminal justice has evolved into a social movement that aspires to implant restorative values into the fabric of everyday life. This new edition explores the implications of this development for restorative justice’s claim to provide a feasible and desirable alternative to mainstream thinking on matters of crime and justice. This book provides an essential introduction to the most fundamental and distinctive ideas of restorative justice and will appeal to students of criminology, law or related disciplines or researchers and professionals with an interest in crime and justice issues. In addition it extends the debate about the meaning of restorative justice – pros, cons and wider significance – hence it will also be of interest to those already familiar with the topic.

Capital punishment as moral imperative

Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one venue where this relationship is evident: among pro-death penalty communications on the Internet. I examine these messages in part because they seem to reveal, rather explicitly, the affective, symbolic nature of popular support for capital punishment in the USA. I suggest that the death penalty becomes an unproblematic, indeed, preferred method and symbol of justice in this venue through a discursive process which reduces the underlying social issues to a battle between good (i.e. the innocent victims) and evil (i.e. capital murderers). Once so reduced, no costs of capital punishment can outweigh the justice achieved by state executions in the rhetoric of pro-death activists and pundits. Ultimately these communications reveal a set of sensibilities about crime and punishment which seem to long for a detour from the civilizing path, in that the communicators seek to deny any interdependencies or empathies with those who commit violent crime, while working to unleash punishment from its institutional restraints.

A Carceral Regime: Violence and Social Memory in Southwest China

In Yu Hua's story Nineteen Eighty-six, a high-school history teacher and amateur scholar of ancient techniques of state punishment returns to his hometown. Many years before, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards took him from his home, tortured him, and locked him up in a school office. He escaped into a world of insane hallucination and wandered the countryside for nearly two decades. In that time, his wife remarried and his daughter forgot him. On his return, he inflicts on himself in the town's streets the five punishments, which he had studied in texts from the Qin dynasty and before: mo (branding), yi (cutting off the nose), fei (severing the legs at the knees), gong (castration), and dapi (dismemberment). While he mutilates himself with hot irons, knives, saws, rocks, and cleavers, his wife, his daughter, and the other townspeople refuse to recognize him. Eventually, his howls of pain become a nuisance. A policeman declines to get involved, and a gang of youths bind the madman with a rope. next morning, his wife and daughter experience a sense of relief as they watch a sanitation worker cart off the bound corpse. A few months later, after spring turns to summer, two young girls inexplicably spot him in the streets again, clean and well groomed, toward them like a flea. His wife and daughter approach and he calls out after them, but they walk past as if they had never met: The madman kept hopping down the sidewalk, calling all the while for his 'little sister.' mother and daughter kept on walking down the street. They didn't look back. They moved forward with ease and grace (Yu 1987:80). Most scholarly treatments of the politics of memory and forgetting employ a well-worn conceptual vocabulary: inscription and erasure, commemoration and transmission, repression and return of the repressed. In reference to contemporary China, this vocabulary is used to elucidate tensions between a state determined

Matrimonio religioso y delito estatal de bigamia

This study looks at the juridical consideration that religious marriages may merit before the State, especially with respect to the state offence of bigamy. It considers the incidence of canonical matrimony in this area, both in that which merits protection and that which requires penal reproach. It poses the question of whether it is possible to maintain the traditional «communis opinio» in this respect. On the contrary, whether the repercussion in this area that the introduction into the Spanish system of marriage regulated by the Accord of the State with FEREDE, FCI and CIE, demands a new understanding. This may avoid in the area of state punishment the aggravation of situations where the matrimonial institution proper to certain faiths are compared with others.

The Irish psyche imprisoned

Some of the important historical influences on the present prison system in the Republic of Ireland are described. The pivotal role of the introduction of the penitentiary system at Mountjoy in 1850 is stressed, both because it represents a momentous break with former cruel and arbitrary modes of State punishment and because it still provides the main conceptual framework of the Irish system. The influential international role in penal theory and practice of Crofton’s progressive stages system is alsp discussed, as is Ireland’s literary contribution to the area. Finally, the present state of the penal system, particularly with respect to imprisonment, is critically analysed.

State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values Nicola Lacey Routledge, London, 1988, 222 pp.

State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values Nicola Lacey Routledge, London, 1988, 222 pp.

The Failure of Punishment as Social Control

I must begin with several disclaimers, which express not the obligatory protestations of false modesty but the real limitations of this article. First, I am not a criminologist, penologist or philosopher of law but a lawyer and sociologist of law. Second, I inevitably reflect the unique social environment within the United States, which may be very different from that of the other countries represented at this conference. Third, my remarks are impressionistic and synthetic, not the conclusions of a careful empirical study.My argument is simple. In the contemporary United States, stateimposed sanctions are seen as a central mechanism of social control. (Of course, they also are seen as incapacitation, retribution, and rehabilitation; but most people would view these as secondary justifications.) Indeed, I believe most Americans would view state punishment as the most important mechanism of social control. By state-imposed sanctions I mean both criminal penalties (execution, imprisonment, fine, probation, and community service) and civil damages (compensatory and punitive).

Nicola Lacey, State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values, London, Routledge, 1988, pp. xiii + 222.

Nicola Lacey, State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values, London, Routledge, 1988, pp. xiii + 222.

State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values. By Nicola Lacey. [London: Routledge. 1988. xiv + 222 pp. £25

State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values. By Nicola Lacey. [London: Routledge. 1988. xiv + 222 pp. £25

The Justification of Deterrent Violence

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Justification of Deterrent ViolenceDaniel M. FarrellDaniel M. Farrell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 100, Number 2Jan., 1990 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/293178 Views: 21Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1990 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Thaddeus Metz A Reconciliation Theory of State Punishment: An Alternative to Protection and Retribution, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 91 (Apr 2022): 119–139.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246121000400Nadine Elzein Deterrence and Self-Defence, The Monist 104, no.44 (Sep 2021): 526–539.https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onab017Ishtiyaque Haji Obligation Incompatibilism and Blameworthiness, Philosophical Papers 50, no.1-21-2 (Jul 2021): 163–185.https://doi.org/10.1080/05568641.2021.1896375David Alm A Puzzle About Proportionality, Res Publica 25, no.22 (Dec 2017): 133–149.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-017-9388-8Daniel M. Farrell Using Wrongdoers Rightly: Tadros on the Justification of General Deterrence, Criminal Law and Philosophy 9, no.11 (Dec 2012): 1–20.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-012-9198-1Nathan Hanna Facing the Consequences, Criminal Law and Philosophy 8, no.33 (Apr 2013): 589–604.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-013-9225-xBill Wringe Collective Agents and Communicative Theories of Punishment, Journal of Social Philosophy 43, no.44 (Dec 2012): 436–456.https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12002by John Gardner and François Tanguay-Renaud Desert and Avoidability in Self-Defense, Ethics 122, no.11 (Jul 2015): 111–134.https://doi.org/10.1086/662294Daniel M. Farrell Deterrence and the Just Distribution of Harm, Social Philosophy and Policy 12, no.22 (Jun 2009): 220–240.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052500004738 A guide to the literature on aggressive behavior, Aggressive Behavior 16, no.55 (Jan 1990): 345–351.https://doi.org/10.1002/1098-2337(1990)16:5<345::AID-AB2480160506>3.0.CO;2-U

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values. By Nicola Lacey . London: Routledge, 1988. Pp. xiii + 222. £25.00 JOHN COTTINGHAM JOHN COTTINGHAM University of Reading Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume XCIX, Issue 393, January 1990, Pages 142–144, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCIX.393.142 Published: 01 January 1990

Punishment and Justice in Adam Smith*

Abstract. The modern interpretation of Smith as a retributive theorist of punishment is challenged in favour of a view of his work as containing a curious amalgam of retributive and utilitarian elements. This unsynthesised theoretical compound accounts for many of the contradictory positions assumed by him, examples of which are given in the article. At the level of “punishment” (i.e., punishment considered without a political dimension), the retributivehtilitarian dichotomy is observed in his discussions of merit and demerit (which are utilitarian in their logic) and propriety and impropriety (which are retributive). At the level of state punishment, the same dichotomy is seen in his juxtaposition of considerations of individual justice and the political ends of punishment. A final section locates Smith's “double cleft stick” theoretically in his position on the one hand in the Hobbesian materialist tradition and on the other in his historical stance half‐way between the individualism of the contractarians and the full blown utilitarianism of Bentham.

State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values by Nicola Lacey London: Routledge, 1988, xiii + 222 (including index) (hardback £25.00).

State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values by Nicola Lacey London: Routledge, 1988, xiii + 222 (including index) (hardback £25.00).

State punishment: political principles and community values

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

Toward a More General Theory of Regulation

Toward a More General Theory of Regulation

The Grounds and Purpose of State Punishment

The Grounds and Purpose of State Punishment