Theories Of Punishment Understanding Deviance

Theories Of Punishment Understanding aberranceThe classical school represented by the works of Jeremy Bentham and Ces be Beccaria assumes that the rational decision is always the decision that will exploit gain and minimise pain for each various(prenominal)ist the felicitation principle that lies behind the penal policy of deterrence. Hence, if the actor is rational, the terra firma can influence some(prenominal) given decision by ensuring that the system of investigating brutal activity will swiftly detect the person responsible and the system of law enforcement th petulant courts will dispense decent pain to each offender so that there will be both specific deterrence (i.e. that a circumstance offender will never choose to break the law again), and general deterrence ( separate potential criminals, observing the penalization of the one offender, will be deterred from hobby in his or her footsteps.1)The Neoclassical School continues to adopt the traditional view that th e punishment imposed by the state for the offence should reflect deterrence. However, they depart from the fender speculation by increasing the severity of sentences and limiting judicial discretion. This emphasises the cordial value of punishment rather than uplifting punishment as an offenders just desolate in a system of retri moreoverive justice. It uses the offender as a symbol through with(predicate) which to send a message to fiat, rather than as a human being who should be judged on his or her witness merits. It abandons the idea of proportionality between severity of punishment with the gravity of offence believeted by the offender. This view has certain clean implications and high costs in maintaining a prison system for an increased number of prisoners. (Something which a third world argonna like ours could non certainly afford). Research has systematic whollyy shown that certainty of arrest rather than severity of punishment is the major deterrent.According to Clarke disgust is a purposive doings designed to meet the offenders common place needs for such things as money, status, sex, excitement, and that meeting these needs involves the making of (sometimes sooner rudimentary) decisions and choices, constrained as they are by limits of time and ability and the availability of relevant information. i.e. offenders make decisions that appear rational to themselves, and they can be persuaded non to engage in crime.Through sensible Choice Theory, Cornish and Clarke2describe crime as an event that occurs when an offender decides to take risk by breaking the law after considering his or her own need for money, personal value or scholarship gos and how well a target is protected, how affluent the neighbourhood is or how efficient the local police are. forwards committing a crime, the reasoning criminal weighs the chances of getting caught, the severity of the expected penalty, the values to be gained by committing the act, and his or her immediate need for that value. The intention is to increase the perceive risks of apprehension, or reduce the anticipated rewards for a crime, or remove the excuses to compliance with the law. The intention would be to design out crime, i.e. to make the disincentives to the commission of crime consistently outweigh the potential benefits. This would involve concerted efforts by the manufacturers of standard equipment slight prone to theft, to design better security systems so that stolen goods cannot be used without a PIN or can be otherwise tracked. It also involves the adoption of surveillance technology to tag goods in stores electronically, install camera systems to monitor behaviour, ameliorate street lighting, fork over more than police officers on patrol, assist householders to improve their home security, etc. A co-ordinated strategy would potentially prevent more crime and so be more cost pop off than imprisoning the few offenders that are currently apprehended. This hypothesis is predicated on the assumption that humans have set of hierarchically aligned preferences, or utilities. By reducing the opportunities for the commission of crimes and target hardening, i.e. making it more difficult to break into houses or to steal from shops, and encouraging more potentiality figures to assume responsibility, potential offenders will be deterred. There is, however, some criticism that better protecting one area will simply displace crime into a less protected area that the evidence is yet equivocal on whether such displacement does occur. The main problem, tranquillize remains in re-ordering the political priorities away from a penal-orientation and in favour of a prevention strategy. At present many another(prenominal) states have invested heavily in the former and see no immediate need to change their policies.To further understand the concept of deviance, the contrastingial association speculation is probably the best known Interactionis t guess of deviance. This theory focuses on how populate learn to be criminals, but does not concern itself with why they expire criminals. Sutherland was following the tradition of Gabriel Tarde who argued that criminals were ordinary people who learned criminal behaviour through imitation of those with whom they interacted. Sutherland refined this proposition by requiring that the interaction occur in intimate groups, where the level of communication is more personal. They learn how to commit the crime they learn motives, drives, rationalisations, and attitudes. George Herbert Mead had developed the idea of the self as a social construct, i.e. a persons self-image is continuously being constructed and reconstructed in interaction with other people. quite a little define their lives by reference to their experiences, and then generalize those definitions to provide a framework of reference for deciding on future action. From a researchers perspective, a subject might view the wo rld very differently if employed rather than unemployed, if in a supportive family or abused by parents. Hence, individual might respond differently to the equal situation depending on how their experience predisposes them to define their current surroundings. A wallet might be demonstrate on the street. One individual might see an opportunity for altruism, returning missing property to its owner. The other might see an opportunity for self-enrichment. Differential association predicts that an individual will choose the criminal path when the balance of definitions for law-breaking exceeds those for law-abiding. This tendency will be reinforced if social association provides role models of significance to the actor. This does not deny that there may be practical motives for crime. If a person is hungry but has no money, there is a temptation to steal. However, needs and values are equivocal. To a keener or lesser extent, both non-criminal and criminal are motivated by the need fo r money and social status. Frustration and boredom may be felt by all.Edward Sutherland and his students, Donald Cressey in particular, became the tenacious champions of the arguments that deviance is a way of life story passed from generation to generation. First modern in 1924, his theory of differential association attempted to make systematic the thesis that crime and deviation are ethnically transmitted in social groups. It holds that criminal behaviour is learned in interaction with other people, e particular(a)ly in personal intimate settings, in a process of communication. Learning is held to get hitched with techniques of committing the crime and the manner of drives, motives, attitudes, and definitions of law. It was argued that a person will become criminal if he or she is exposed to an excess of definitions favourable to the impingement of law over definitions unfavourable to violation of law, the process itself being described as differential association. such di fferential association will be affected by variations in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity. Sutherland supposed the learning of criminal behaviour to involve all the social and psychological mechanisms at work in other learning. Finally he claimed that although criminal behaviour is an preparation of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values because non-criminal behaviour is also an expression of those same needs and values.3Finally the social disarrangement theory(Chicago school) will clear the whole concept of deviance and delinquencies. Anthropology, the science of man has been mainly concerned with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his life is more open to observation and study. Urban life and culture are more varied, subtle and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both instances the same. Most sociology departments are inattentiv e to the physical and social contexts in which they exist. But the Chicago sociology was to become the sociology of Chicago itself, a detailed anthropological mapping of the social territories that made the city.4Urban life resembled a phantasmagoria, a welter of unsteady scenes and identities where everything is in a state of agitation everything seems to be undergoing a change. Society is, apparently, not much more than a congeries and constellation of social atoms. They maintained that intimacy resided uncomplete in properties of the world alone nor in properties of the observer alone. Facts, it was held, not self-evident. They are selected and interpreted by the mind that surveys them. People with different perspectives and different problems will not see exactly the same phenomena. Thus the meaning of food will not be identical for the chef, the waiter, and the guest at meal. It will shift in response to the peculiar dealings which one has with the object. But that shift is not wholly dependent on the whim of the contemplating intelligence. The imagination is not free to bring into being anything which it may choose to devise. It is constrained by the capacity of the world to answer back and impose itself upon thought.5Hence it came about that pragmatism placed effective knowledge in a transaction between the observer and the environment which he discover the knowledge was no longer defined as a state or as a condition but as a process, an action. It proceeded from experiences in the world. Experience was to become elevated to a pre-eminent position it was a undertake of valid knowledge. Formal speculation was regarded as a pallid and misleading substitute for personal acquaintance with phenomena. It is the personal experience of those best qualified in our circle of knowledge to have experience, to tell us what is. Now what does thinking about the experience of those persons come to, compared to directly and personally tinctureing it as they feel it? The philosophers are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth.6The real world was the experience of actual man and women and not abbreviated and shorthand descriptions of it that we call knowledge. The business of research is to understand the social world, and the social world is itself manufactured by the practical experience of those who live in it. Practical experiences themselves are responses to situations and problems, and they change as those problems change. Sociology is not devoted to the study of states but of process, of things and people in change. It must(prenominal) be so nonionized that it can observe and cut across processes over time. It must also be so organized that it can reach those processes practically and not by surmise and logic alone. The most effective research strategy is one that requires sociologists to participate personally in the world which they would analyse. Without such participation, knowledge is not experience but a n uncertain commentary on experience.City life and urbanization were analysed by a collection of master forms which had been borrowed from biology. They were represented as the workings of an ecological order. Ecology is an emphasis on the patterns and organized changes which are produced by different species liveliness together in the same physical territory. Whatever else men are, they are also animals, and as such they record the effects of physical aggregation and of their habitat.7People are quite capable of detaching themselves from their own territories they display rational behaviour they can organise themselves into institutions which impose a distinct order their works are modified by an elaborate technology their activities are shaped by conscious planning and they are governed by a symbolism which interprets and changes what they do. The city is not merely an artefact, but an organism. Its growth is, fundamentally and as a whole, natural, i.e. uncontrolled and un-design ed. The forms it tends to assume are those which represent and match to the functions it is called upon to perform.The emergence of Chicago itself was explained by what came to be known as the zonal hypothesis, the contention that cities evolve in a series of concentric zones of activity and life. At the very centre is the business district which is typified by a small residential population and high property values. About it is a zone of pitch contour whose population is fluid and poor, whose housing is deteriorating and whose stability is threatened by the encroaching business district. About that zone, in turn, are areas of working-class housing, middle-class housing, and, on the fringes, suburbia. from each one zone is itself composed of diverse natural areas which abut on one another. They are natural because they are not entirely intended, because they manifest a rough correspondence to the territorial division of species in nature. It was found that there was massive conce ntration of pathological behaviour in the zone in transition. Partly because of its great visibility, such behaviour appeared to be confined to a limited territorial belt. Within that belt there was a piling-up of all those phenomena that are conventionally set as social problems mental disorder, prostitution, suicide, alcoholism, infant mortality, juvenile delinquency, crime, disease and poverty. The incidence of pathology could be plotted with data collected from court records, census reports, and special surveys. Deviance may have been present elsewhere but it was hugely conspicuous in the transitional zone. The Zone in transition was taken to be unruly. It housed people who were unaccustomed to one another, to city life, and to America. Lacking substantial resources and deserting much that had been familiar, they were required to establish a way of life in a difficult and shifting environment. One of the prime problems which they faced was the sheer array of different worlds ar ound them. When the inner composition and external relations of those worlds appeared unstable, the whole invited the description of social disorganisation. disarrangement was a face of moral dissensus the degree to which the members of a society lose their common understandings, i.e. the degree to which consensus is undermined, is the judge of a societys state of disorganization.8Disorganization also faceized the fragmented, the fluid, and the anon. elements of urban life contacts are extended, heterogeneous groups mingle, neighbourhoods disappear, and people, deprived of local and family ties, are forced to live under loose, transient and impersonal relations.9Integral to the conception of disorganization was the companion idea of weak social control. Those who stressed internal disorder could cite numerous obstructions to social control. Moral habits could not be properly implanted. People were neither effectively curbed, nor could they curb one another. They did not know each other well, formed few commitments to the area or to its population, were confused by moral diversity, and were loath to intervene in the affairs of their fellows. Morality could not be taken for granted. It became relativistic and circumstantial, readily adapted for selfish purposes, permitted the evolution of extenuating casts. more particularly, its influence could not extend very far. Those entitled to exercise moral claims were confined to the family and immediate neighbours, all other becoming moral strangers.10Their lives had been punctuated by cultural discontinuities which became especially taxing for the second generation. Morally displaced, economically and politically peripheral, they might innovate new modes of social organization. Most typically they created a social order which corresponded to neither the old world nor the new but was a shifting amalgam of both.11They also improvised new styles of behaviour and morality which could well embrace delinquency as a pos sible solution to the dilemmas of exclusion and impotence.12Crime and delinquency were, thus, explained principally by the effects of the isolation of certain natural areas. They became a kind of surrogate social order, an alternative pattern, which replaced the workings of conventional institutions.13Their forms were themselves explained as a functional response to deprivation, to the social and moral structures imported by immigrants, and to the experience of growing up in the inner city. Deprived of political control and economic resources, first and second generation immigrants produced their own iniquity politics and shadow economy.Children raised in the crowded zone in transition led an intensely earthly concern life, playing with others on the street, forming into small groups which eventually crystallized into gangs. Such exposure placed the child under constant surveillance from others. From an early age he was awarded a communal identity and reputation. In an insecure so cial environment, the preservation of reputation acquired strategic importance. What is significant is the persistence of tradition in the zone in transition. Ideas of conduct are passed on from generation to generation of boys living the national lives of the street traditions of delinquency are preserved and transmitted through the medium of social contact with the unsupervised play group and the more extremely organized delinquent and criminal gangs.14Theories of punishmentEach society has its own way of social control for which it frames certain laws and also mentions the sanctions with them. These sanctions are nothing but the punishments. In primitive society punishment was left to the individuals wronged or their families, and was vindictive or retributive in quantity and quality it would bear no special relation to the character or gravity of the offence.Ordinarily there would arise the idea of proportionate punishment, of which the characteristic type is an eye for an eye . The second stage was punishment by individuals under the control of the state, or community in the third stage, with the growth of law, the state took over the primitive function and provided itself with the machinery of justice for the maintenance of public order. Henceforward crimes are against the state, and the exaction of punishment by the wronged individual is illegal (compared to the earlier lynch law). Even at this stage the vindictive or retributive character of punishment remains, but gradually, and especially after the humanist government under thinkers like Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, new theories began to emerge. Two chief trains of thought have combined in the condemnation of primitive theory and practice. On the one hand the retributive principle itself has been very prodigiously superseded by the protective and the reformative on the other punishments involving bodily pain have become objectional to the general sense of society. Consequently corporal and even cap ital punishment occupy a far less prominent position, and tend everywhere to disappear. It began to be recognized also that stereotyped punishments, such as belonging to penal codes, fail to take due account of the particular condition of an offence and the character and mountain of the offender. A fixed fine, for example, operates very unequally on rich and poor.With new criminological developments, particularly in the field of penology, it has been generally accepted that punishment must be in proportion to the gravity of the offence. It has been further suggested that reformation of criminal rather than his expulsion from society is more purposeful for his rehabilitation. With this aim in view, the modern penologists have focused their attention on individualization of offender through treatment methods. Today, old cruel methods of punishment such as mutilation, branding, hanging, burning, stoning, flogging, amputation, starving the criminal to goal or subjecting him to pillor y or poetic punishment, etc. are completely abandoned15. frustrate was a method of corporal punishment under which the offender was subjected to public ridicule by exposing him to punishment in public places. Different poetic punishments were provided for different crimes. For example, cutting off hands for theft, taking off tongue for the offence of perjury, emasculation for rape, shaving off the head of a woman in display case she committed a sex-crime or whipping her in public street and similar other modes were common forms of poetic punishment during the middle ages. Modern penologists have substituted new forms of penal sanctions for the old methods of sentencing. The present modes of punishment commonly include imposition of monetary fines, segregation of the offender temporarily or permanently through imprisonment or externment or compensation by way of damages from the wrong-doer in case of civil injury. The credit for introducing these penological changes goes to eminent criminologists, like Beccaria, Garofalo, Ferri, Tarde, Bentham, and others who formulated sound principles of punishment and made all out efforts to ensure rehabilitation of offenders so as to make them useful member of society once again. Garofalo strongly recommended acid or banishment of certain types of offenders who had to be segregated from society. Modern penal systems, however, limit the punishment of transportation within the homeland so that potentiality of prisoners is utilise within the country itself. Of late, open jails, parole or probation are being intensively used for long-termers so that they can earn their livelihood while in the institution.16Though opinions have differed, as regards punishment of offenders varying from age-old traditionalism to recent modernism, broadly speaking four types of views can be distinctly found to prevail. Modern penologists prefer to call them theories of punishment, which are,The Deterrent theoryThe Retributive theoryThe Reformati ve theory andThe Preventive theory.Off late however, there has been the re-emergence of the Retributive theory in a diluted form and this is called as the Expiatory theory which was mainly in vogue in Ancient India and erstwhile Europe.Deterrent theoryEarlier modes of punishment were, deterrent in nature. This kind of punishment presupposes infliction of severe penalties on offenders with a view to deterring them from committing crime.The founder of this theory, Jeremy Bentham, based his theory of situate on the principle of hedonism which said that a man would be deterred from committing a crime if the punishment applied was swift, certain and severe. This theory considers punishment as an evil, but is necessary to maintain order in the society.The deterrent theory also seeks to create some kind of fear in the mind of others by providing passable penalty and exemplary punishment to offenders which keeps them away from criminality. Thus the rigor of penal discipline acts as a suff icient warning to offenders as also others. Therefore, deterrence is undoubtedly one of the effective policies which almost every penal system accepts despite the fact that it invariably fails in its practical application. Deterrence, as a measure of punishment particularly fails in case hardened criminals because the severity of punishment hardly has any effect on them. It also fails to deter ordinary criminals because many crimes are committed on the spur of the moment without any prior intention or design. The futility of deterrent punishment is evinced from the fact that quite a large number of hardened criminals return to prison soon after their release. They prefer to remain in prison rather than leading a free life in society. Thus the object underlying deterrent punishment is unquestionably defeated. This view finds support from the fact that when capital punishment was being publicly awarded by hanging the person to death in public places, many persons committed crimes of p ick-pocketing, theft, assault or even murder in those men-packed gatherings despite the ghastly scene. execute it to say that the doctrine concerning deterrent punishment has been closely associated with the primitive theories of crime and criminal responsibility. In earlier times, crime was attributed to the influence of evil spirit or free-will of the offender. So the society preferred severe and deterrent punishment for the offender for his act of voluntary perversity which was believed to be a challenge to God or religion.17The punishment ought to be a terror to evil-doers and an awful warning to all others who might be tempted to imitate them. This contention finds support in Benthams observation, who said- habitual prevention ought to be the chief end of punishment. An unpunished crime leaves the path of crime open, not only to the same delinquent but also to all those who may have some motives and opportunities for entering upon it we perceive that punishment inflicted on the individual becomes source of security for allPunishment is not to be regarded as an act of wrath or vengeance against a guilty individual who has given way to mischievous inclinations, but as an indispensable sacrifice to the society.Bentham, however, believed that offenders must be provided an opportunity for reformation by the process of rehabilitation. From this point of view, his theory may be considered forward looking as it was more concerned with the consequences of punishment rather than the wrong done, which being a post, cannot be altered.18Retributive TheoryRetribution is the practice of getting even with a wrongdoer-the suffering of the wrongdoer is seen as good in itself, even if it has no other benefits. One reason for societies to include this judicial element is to diminish the perceived need for street justice, line of business revenge and vigilantism. Retribution sets an important standard on punishment the transgressor must get what he deserves, but no more. The refore, a thief put to death is not retribution a murderer put to death is. In old times when a man injure another, it was considered to be the right of the injured person to take revenge on the person causing injury. Since the formulation of the Hammurabis Code, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been accepted by the general public that is the criminal deserves to suffer. Later this stance changed, Adam Smith, who is credited as the father of Welfare Economics, wrote extensively about punishment. In his view, an important reason for punishment is not only deterrence, but also satisfying the resentment of the victim. Moreover, in the case of the death penalty, the retribution goes to the dead victim, not his family.One great difficulty of this draw close is that of judging exactly what it is that the transgressor deserves. For instance, it may be retribution to put a thief to death if he steals a familys only means of livelihood conversely, mitigating circumstances may l ead to the conclusion that the execution of a murderer is not retribution.The adherents of retributive theory, that punishment satisfies the feeling of revenge, are few in number. As has been observed by Lee, An act which is described as a crime today was looked upon as a private wrong previously. The wronged party and not the State or that which stood for the State brought suit. Professor Gillin19quotes many illustrations of the working of private vengeance. Citing an instance of punishment for adultery in ancient Germany he observers Its punishment is instant and at the pastime of the husband. He cuts off the hair of the offender, strips her and in the presence of her relations expels her from the house and pursues her with strips though the whole village.Salmond as regards the theory observes Conception of retributive justice still retains a prominent place in popular thought. It flourishes also in the writings of the theologians and of those imbued with theological modes of tho ught and even among the philosophers it does not lack advocates. Kant, for example, expresses the opinion that punishment cannot rightly be inflicted for the sake or any benefit to be derived from it either by the criminal himself or by the society and that the sole and sufficient reasons and justification of it lies in the fact that evil has been done to him who suffers it.The death sentence has been used as an effective weapon of retributive justice for centuries. The justification advanced is that it is lawful to forfeit the life of a person who takes away anothers life. A person who kills another must be eliminated from the society and, therefore, fully merits his execution.20On the same lines, in the case of the Chopra children murder case where the Honble Supreme Court while upholding the death sentence observed as follows The survival of an orderly society demands the extinguishing of the life of persons like Ranga and Billa who are a menace to social order and security. The y are professional murderers and deserve no sympathy even in price of the evolving standards of decency of a maturing soc