PUNISHMENT

Once a person has been found guilty, or has admitted their wrongdoing, the contemporary legal landscape offers a broad range of options. While prisons continue to be a significant presence in popular imagination, political claims and legal processes, other outcomes are also available. Along with prisons, these alternatives are often imposed in a context of debate and controversy. The lack of agreement over appropriate sanctions reflects the more general confusion over underlying philosophies of punishment.

Today ideologies about deterrence seem to play the major role in the justification of punitive sanctions against offenders. Yet, amazingly enough, there is little evidence for this (Nagin and Paternoster, 1991). Efforts to demonstrate deterrence usually try to establish a correlation between severity and certainty of penalty and crime rates within a given jurisdiction. For example, we might compare rates for drug offending before and after tough new anti-drug laws are established, or perhaps compare states with divergent sentencing policies. Studies of this kind have usually demonstrated either no support or very limited support for deterrence theory. More sophisticated attempts to look at deterrence try to measure perceptions and mental processes. This is because, according to deterrence ideology, potential offenders weigh up the benefits and risks of crime, or experience fear of possible punishment. Getting at perceptions is methodologically very difficult. In prisons we have a sample of those who were not deterred. A more representative sample would include people who did not commit crimes because they were deterred. Investigating ‘non-events’ such as this is always problematic and usually involves asking respondents to recall decisions about past episodes where they were tempted to commit a deviant act or else asking for responses to hypothetical scenarios. Such strategies are seriously flawed because they rely on selective and faulty mental processes rather than capturing the real-time, real-world experience of criminal decision-making.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, the research looking into deterrence has generated some consistent findings.

These kinds of results lend indirect support to the diverse theoretical positions that suggest contemporary punishment has little to do with controlling crime and criminals and might have more to do with broader social processes of which criminal justice actors are unaware. We reviewed some of these in the first chapter – most notably work in the traditions established by Durkheim, Foucault and Marx.

The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, opened in 1773, is often cited as an early exemplar of an institution carrying a prison ideology of this kind (Rothman, 1995). Although it looks like a harsh place to modern eyes, it was established largely through the efforts of citizens concerned about the cruelty of the then existing punishments. Quaker philosophies had a significant impact upon the prison. It was believed that quiet contemplation would lead to penitence. Inmates were held in solitary confinement in small cells where they also worked. They would be let out only to attend religious ceremonies. This model was later copied elsewhere in the United States and is sometimes referred to as the ‘Pennsylvania System’. Ideas similar to those of the Pennsylvania system could be found world-wide. Thus, half a globe away in the Port Arthur penal colony in Tasmania, Australia, ideas about convict separation were taken to extremes. Here prisoners had to wear hoods to obscure their identities whenever they were outside their cells and were forbidden to talk to one another. Identified by numbers, inmates had to wear their hoods on the way to and from religious worship. Only within the chapel could they remove them. Here they were separated from each other by wooden screens. They could look only forwards at the preacher with possibilities for mutual interaction minimized.

At the sound of a horn or a bell, the guards opened the cells and the prisoners stepped onto the deck and then in lockstep went into the yard. In formation they emptied their night pails, which they then washed; they took a few more steps and placed the pails on a rack to dry. They then move in lockstep to the shop and worked on their tasks while sitting in rows on long benches. When the bell rang for mealtime, they grouped again in single file, passed into the kitchen, picked up their rations … [and] ate their meals while, by regulation, sitting erect with their backs straight.

• Educational opportunities and life skills (e.g. obtaining a high school diploma, learning a trade). The object here is to improve opportunities and life chances, perhaps leading to a job and a stake in conformity.
  
• Medical interventions (e.g. drug detoxification). These programs try to eradicate the clinical conditions that lead to offending behaviour.
  
• Therapeutic and counselling interventions (e.g. sex offender programs, substance abuse programs, anger management programs). These aim to encourage personal growth and reflexivity, allowing individuals to understand, recognize and modify patterns of offending behaviour.

From the perspective of critical sociology, prison programs have been interpreted as yet another attempt at social control rather than as creative and genuine efforts to help. For example, when Dobash et al. (1986) looked at the Scottish women’s prison, they argued that ideals behind psychiatric and drama therapy programs arose from stereotypes. These suggested that offending women were mentally ill or disturbed and were driven by biological forces and emotions rather than reason. Institutional attempts to modify behaviour and personality could be read in Foucauldian terms as something that has ‘enlarged the net of discipline and woven it still finer by extending surveillance and control to even the most intimate and mundane aspects of daily life’ (ibid.: 158). They point out that women were obliged to monitor themselves and appear polite and compliant in order to fit in with the norms of the therapeutic regime. Failure to become a ‘good woman’ – essentially complying with middle-class norms – would result in punishment. Similarly, work programs centred around the idea that the women had failed as wives and mothers. Skills training centred largely on domestic activities and on the needs of the institution. Hence women could work in cooking and cleaning roles, keeping costs down in learning to become the ‘good woman’.

Some suggest we need to think about the costs of prisons not only in terms of their impact on offenders or on the taxpayer, but also in terms of their impact on others. John Hagan and Ronit Dinovitzer (1999), for example, attempt to itemize the consequences of imprisonment on the children of the inmate. These can include ‘the strains of economic deprivation, the loss of parental socialization through role modelling, support, supervision and the stigma and shame of social labelling’ (ibid.: 123). They suggest that children can consequently suffer adverse mental health, increased involvement in delinquency and educational failure. There are also what Hagan and Dinovitzer call ‘collateral costs’ not only to individuals but to collective forms of human and social capital. These can be thought of in part as opportunity costs, with socially beneficial activities forsaken when available money is spent on prisons. In California, for example, the state spends $6,000 per annum on each college student but about $34,000 per year on each prison inmate (ibid.: 130). In addition, as the next section outlines, minority communities as a whole lose social capital as an entire generation of members are locked away, only to be further socialized into deviant subcultures.

Census information shows that prison populations tend to be comprised of repeat offenders who have been charged with serious offences such as robbery, assault and drug dealing. These are mostly male, from working-class or poor backgrounds. They are usually aged under 30 years. Minorities tend to be dramatically over-represented. These patterns can be illustrated with reference to Australia (ABS, 1998). In 1997 some 28 percent of prisoners were aged under 25. Indigenous people made up 18 percent of the prison population, even though Aborigines are only 2 percent of the wider population. Women made up only 6 percent of Australian prisoners. Some 58 percent of inmates had been incarcerated before, suggesting that prison does not deter or reform very well.

The literature explaining the rising prison population points to a series of factors which are not mutually exclusive (Caplow and Simon, 1999; Mauer, 2001):