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SOCIOLOGY OF PUNISHMENT

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012, , Punishment, Penology, Criminology, Operant conditioning, Classical conditioning,

Punishment is a negative sanction imposed on the violator of a system of rules and imposed by an authorized agent of that system of rules.

The criminal courts can punish people for their violations of criminal law,

The referee can punish those who violate the rules of a game of hockey,

The principal can punish students who violate rules of the school.

The evolution of altruistic punishment 
Robert Boyd, Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, and Peter J. Richerson
Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such "altruistic punishment" may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups. Thus, applying such models to the evolution of altruistic punishment leads to the prediction that people will not incur costs to punish others to provide benefits to large groups of nonrelatives. However, here we show that an important asymmetry between altruistic cooperation and altruistic punishment allows altruistic punishment to evolve in populations engaged in one-time, anonymous interactions. This process allows both altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation to be maintained even when groups are large and other parameter values approximate conditions that characterize cultural evolution in the small-scale societies in which humans lived for most of our prehistory. - pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/6/3531

Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation 
James H. Fowler, Department of Political Science, University of California
Edited by Henry C. Harpending, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.
How did human cooperation evolve? Recent evidence shows that many people are willing to engage in altruistic punishment, voluntarily paying a cost to punish noncooperators. Although this behavior helps to explain how cooperation can persist, it creates an important puzzle. If altruistic punishment provides benefits to nonpunishers and is costly to punishers, then how could it evolve? Drawing on recent insights from voluntary public goods games, I present a simple evolutionary model in which altruistic punishers can enter and will always come to dominate a population of contributors, defectors, and nonparticipants. The model suggests that the cycle of strategies in voluntary public goods games does not persist in the presence of punishment strategies. It also suggests that punishment can only enforce payoff-improving strategies, contrary to a widely cited "folk theorem" result that suggests that punishment can allow the evolution of any strategy.

Costly Punishment Across Human Societies 
Joseph Henrich, Richard McElreath, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, Edwins Gwako, Natalie Henrich, Carolyn Lesorogol, Frank Marlowe, David Tracer, John Ziker 
Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain. - sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5781/1767

The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment - Dominique J. F. de Quervain, Urs Fischbacher, Valerie Treyer, Melanie Schellhammer, Ulrich Schnyder, Alfred Buck, Ernst Fehr 
Many people voluntarily incur costs to punish violations of social norms. Evolutionary models and empirical evidence indicate that such altruistic punishment has been a decisive force in the evolution of human cooperation. We used H2 15O positron emission tomography to examine the neural basis for altruistic punishment of defectors in an economic exchange. Subjects could punish defection either symbolically or effectively. Symbolic punishment did not reduce the defector's economic payoff, whereas effective punishment did reduce the payoff. We scanned the subjects' brains while they learned about the defector's abuse of trust and determined the punishment. Effective punishment, as compared with symbolic punishment, activated the dorsal striatum, which has been implicated in the processing of rewards that accrue as a result of goal-directed actions. Moreover, subjects with stronger activations in the dorsal striatum were willing to incur greater costs in order to punish. Our findings support the hypothesis that people derive satisfaction from punishing norm violations and that the activation in the dorsal striatum reflects the anticipated satisfaction from punishing defectors. - sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5688/1254 

Penology

Penology is the study of the treatment and punishment of criminal offenders. Penology is included within criminology.

Penology, Latin poena for punishment, comprises penitentiary science concerned with the processes devised and adopted for the punishment, repression, and prevention of crime, and the treatment of prisoners.

Penology is the branch of knowledge that deals with the prevention and punishment of crime with the penal system.

Penology and Social Control: An Empirical Assessment
Blomberg, Tom., Bales, William. and Mann, Karen.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY
Abstract: Over the past several decades, a series of important theoretical studies of penal control have appeared in the literature. Prominent examples include Cohen’s 1985 Visions of Control, Feeley and Simon’s 1992 “The New Penology” and Garland’s 2001 The Culture of Control. These studies have provided probing, imaginative and nuanced explanations of what the authors believe to be “given;” namely, that over the past several decades there has occurred ever changing, more pervasive and rapidly escalating penal control. Notably absent from this theoretical literature has been compelling empirical evidence. Rather, by providing support for their arguments, the studies have relied upon published materials that have been highly selective, incomplete and discontinuous. This study addresses this empirical deficiency in the penal control literature. The primary empirical question addressed is what has occurred with U.S. penal control over the past 36 years? To answer this question, the study employs data reflecting annual trends in U.S. rates of incarceration and other forms of community penal strategies from 1970 to 2006. The paper concludes with an assessment of the “fit” between the major theoretical arguments regarding penal control and the papers’ reported findings.

Privatization and the New Penology: How Profit Shapes Punishment in the Public Prison - McCorkel, Jill.
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY
Abstract: Research on the privatization of punishment has focused almost exclusively on the emergence of private prisons—prisons that are designed, managed, and operated by private companies and funded through contracts with federal, state, and local governments. Privatization, however, is a far broader phenomenon than this. Private companies are increasingly present in public prisons, providing a large array of services and technologies. This ethnographic study documents the impact of private vendors on the public prison, with a particular focus on how privatization changed both the logic and practice of punishment, and manufactured demand for new forms of social control.

GPS-Electronic Monitoring and Contemporary Penology: A Case Study of US GPS-Electronic Monitoring Programmes - Ryan Cotter, Willem De Lint
The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 48, Issue 1, pp. 76-87, February 2009
Abstract: Criminologists have noted a significant reorientation of criminal justice policy. Initially this reorientation was most dramatically articulated by Feeley and Simon (1992), who suggested that penality has shifted from the modern to new penology. Criticisms of the binary modern and new penology model has led to the contemporary understanding of penality through a threefold model of: punishment-punitive, rehabilitative-humanistic and managerial-surveillant discourses. This research represents an empirically-based attempt to locate GPS-electronic monitoring within this threefold model.

The Impact of the "New Penology" on ISP
Gerald J. Bayens, Michael W. Manske, John Ortiz Smykla
Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, 51-62 (1998) DOI: 10.1177/073401689802300104
This article provides a critique of Feeley and Simon's claim (1992) that a new transformation in penology is emerging in the United States, vis-a-vis McCorkle and Crank's position (1996) that the transformation is more rhetoric than reality. Data were collected for a 60-day study period, initially to assess intensive supervised probation (ISP) workloads as well as the attitudes of criminal justice work groups toward ISP in "Midwestern County." Data analysis focused on the amount of supervision time, the number of face-to-face contacts, the time spent performing a supervision activity, and the number of drug tests carried out across four levels of offender risk. It was found that in no case did the high-supervision group receive the highest amount of supervision resources per capita. We offer a caveat, however, in terms of risk assessment and of the nature and quality of an ISP officer's supervision.

Syllabus - CCJ 5309 Penology - FSU School of Criminology - Dr. Cecil Greek
Required Texts:
Blomberg, Thomas and Stanley Cohen (eds.). (2003). Punishment and social control. (2nd edition). NY:Aldine de Gruyter.
Blomberg, Thomas and Karol Lucken. (2000). American penology. NY:Aldine de Gruyter.
Garland, David. (2001). The culture of control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Garland, David. (1990). Punishment and modern society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Johnson, Robert. (2002). Hard time: Understanding and reforming the prison. (3rd edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Latessa, Edward et al (eds.). (2005). Correctional contexts: Contemporary and classical readings. (3rd edition). Los Angeles: Roxbury. ISBN: 1931719594
Rothman, David. (1990). The discovery of the asylum. (revised edition). NY:Aldine de Gruyter.

Course Overview:
As with all social institutions, one of the best ways to approach an understanding of how we got to our current situation is through historical review of past practices leading up to the present. This is certainly the case with our society’s decision that the prototypical form of punishment for criminal offenders ought to be incarceration in a penal facility.
Thus, the first part of the course will focus on the historical constellation of factors that led to the adoption and eventual acceptance of prisons as the American way of punishment. However, once the prison model was adopted, it did not remain stagnant. Each generation of reformers and penologists offered ways to improve the outcome of inmates’ prison experiences. Ideas about sentencing, optimal prison regimes and “treatment” changed as a result.
An important theoretical trend to analyze is what these changes implied about our society’s overall vision of how to socially control deviant individuals and populations. David Garland has best analyzed these changes. The course will focus on the major models developed in the “sociology of punishment,” up to and including our current system’s move toward “post-modern” punishment regimes.
The second half of the course will discuss some of the major critical issues within contemporary correctional systems. These topics include those who live and work within correctional settings. Inmate subcultures have been of interest to criminologists since the mid-20th century. On the other hand, the experiences of correctional staff has only more recently been subjected to penological study. Nevertheless, how correctional staff maintain order without being seen as legitimate power holders by inmates remains an important sociological question. As total control is not possible (except in supermax type facilities), how inmates and correctional staff interact to maintain order is an important empirical area of study.
As the United States is one of the few modern nations to retain the death penalty, we will discuss several issues related to its contemporary use. Included will be subtopics such as false convictions, racial imbalance in its usage and life on death row.
The long standing debates about the functions of prisons include considerable discussion of whether prisons can “cure” crime. In particular, various treatment modalities have been created and utilized in hopes of reducing recidivism. The current ethos is anti-treatment, pro-punishment; nevertheless, treatment programs, broadly defined, continue within most correctional systems.
Since the 1960s, American correctional institutions have been an arena no longer considered “hands off” to inmates’ Constitutional rights. The course will cover the impact of opening our correctional institutions to the courts, current inmates’ rights and the continuing struggle for legal authority.
Another product of the 1960s was the massive expansion of community corrections as an alternative to prison. While first argued for from anti-labeling and anti-stigmatization perspectives, the current rationale for community corrections comes from the more crime-control oriented intermediate sanctions movement. Is this movement a genuine alternative to prison or further example of net widening?
The course will conclude with a discussion of where we go from here. Will the future bring greater or lesser use of incarceration? Will treatment become more widely supported again? Will simple economics lead to greater use of community options? What are the future technologies that will be employed in 21st Century social control?

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