Why punishment pleases: Punitive feelings in a world of hostile solidarity

Carvalho, Henrique; Chamberlen, Anastasia

doi:10.1177/1462474517699814

Cited by 47 publications

(60 citation statements)

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“…It targets the individual offender as well as his or her family and, as a collective penal ritual which ‘draws on norms of retributive justice’ (Garland, 2005: 799), is largely tolerated by both state and non-state actors (being only weakly policed or punished). As such, it enjoys a degree of legitimacy, albeit unstable and contested, in terms of which a ‘hostile solidarity’ (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2018: 217) is engendered against ‘wrongdoers’ (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2018: 225; Garland, 2005; Mead, 1918; Super, 2016b).…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Three warnings and you’re out’: Banishment and precarious penality in South Africa’s informal settlements

Super

2019

Punishment & Society

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This paper asks how punitive forms of non-state punishment play out on the margins of the state, in informal (shack) settlements in South Africa. My focus is on the practice of forcing those who are suspected of certain offences to leave their homes in informal settlements. I refer to this as ‘banishment’ and argue that it is a ‘penal phenomenon’ which is intimately tied to the general precarity that residents experience on a daily basis. The paper examines the ways in which these formally illegal, but nonetheless legitimate practices, draw on and reconfigure liberal state punishment. I use my study to make a broader theoretical point about the interplay between lawful state punishment and unlawful punishment on the periphery of the state. The blurred boundaries between legal (state) violence and illegal (but nonetheless legitimate) violence are particularly ‘visible’ in situations of ‘precarious penality’ – a term that I use to describe the unstable, violent and exclusionary penality that manifests in situations of socio-economic precarity, particularly in contexts of inequality, high rates of violent crime and a delegitimated rule of law. In these circumstances ‘non-state’ punishment contributes to the construction and maintenance of group boundaries and fulfils a similar function to ‘formal’ punishment. Thus, I ask whether it makes sense to exclude ‘non-state’ public authorities which act against ‘criminality’, when asking what or who constitutes the penal field and, when measuring state punitiveness?

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Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Three warnings and you’re out’: Banishment and precarious penality in South Africa’s informal settlements

Super

2019

Punishment & Society

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“…Regarding ethnicity, scholars of punishment disparities have demonstrated that regimes may rely on criminal justice institutions to establish the legitimacy of ethnically-dominated states (LaFree, 1998; Ruddell, 2005) as well as to oppress or exclude minority populations from participation in political action, formal labor markets, and other segments of civic society (Blackmon, 2008; Goffman, 2009; Uggen and Manza, 2002; Van Cleve, 2016; Wacquant, 2009; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Western and Pettit, 2010). Punishment may engender solidarity amongst groups represented by the punishers (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2017; Durkheim, 1893/1997). Indeed, “tough-on-crime” rhetorics have been successful tools in securing white political support, reinforcing the notion that dominant ethnic groups mobilize carceral apparatuses to consolidate and legitimate control (Lynch, 2009; Sudbury, 2014).…”

Section: Ethnic Politics and State Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Difference and punishment: Ethno-political exclusion, colonial institutional legacies, and incarceration

Davis

Gibson-Light

2018

Punishment & Society

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One dominant theoretical explanation for higher incarceration rates across the world focuses on how a nation’s level of diversity or minority presence broadly writ unleashes racial resentment that can lead to incarceration. This article contends that population heterogeneity alone offers an incomplete picture of how ethnic-based tension can affect incarceration rates. Rather, we argue that majority ethnic groups around the world use prison systems in order to govern and manage minority populations, especially those systematically excluded from power. In addition, we argue that these political structures have their roots in a nation’s colonial legacy, a legacy that shapes a nation’s contemporary incarceration rates. Results from our quantitative analysis reveal that controlling for competing explanations, there are positive associations between ethnic political exclusion and the length and form of a nation’s colonial experience and rates of incarceration.

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“…Claims that punishment expresses helpless anxiety (Robinson and Gadd, 2016), aggressive impulses of sadism or self-assertion (Carvalho and Chamberlen, 2018; Mead, 1964 [1918]), envy and masochistic guilty desires for punishment (Garland, 1990; Maruna et al, 2004) or guilty feelings of complicity with the social causes of crime (Garland, 2001; Maruna et al, 2004), along with their rationalization, disowning or disavowal, are suggestive, but offered up unsystematically they give us little in the way of a deeper grasp of the symbolic unities and antinomies of penality. This is because they deploy abstractions from a psychoanalytic conception of soul ( psyche ), the core of which is, as Lear has argued, not the idea of an irrational unconscious mind but rather a distinctive conception of unconscious mindedness.…”

Section: The Priority Of Unconscious Phantasymentioning

confidence: 99%

What Punishment Expresses

Reeves

2018

Social & Legal Studies

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It is much easier to show that punishment has a symbolic significance than to say exactly what it is that punishment expresses... (Feinberg, 1965: 402) these conventional 'symbols' and could choose others (see Hampton, 1992, and a critique of Hampton's position in Gert et al, 2004). Hence conventionalist expressivism shines little light on the centrality of hard treatment in penality generally, let alone on the specific expressive meanings of the 'painful symbolic machinery' (Feinberg, 1965: 420) that we happen to have in fact developed in modern penality. Now this naïve conception of expression must, psychosocial theory may say, presuppose an unrealistic moral psychology-a moralizing psychology, which simply builds the psychology out of the moral categories rather than offering a genuinely psychological account of them. Psychosocial accounts offer deep interpretation of the latent content expressed in punishment that do not simply accept uncritically the manifest moral story of retributive penality, that punishment expresses deserved condemnation in response to wrongdoing, but try to be sensitive to the underlying dynamics at work. They find such items as solidarity (Durkheim, 1893/1997) , aggression, fear, and guilt, and their distortion, rationalisation or disavowal (Nietzsche, 1887/1998:; Mead, 1918/1964) as the real, deeper, latent expressive content of punishment. Recent psychoanalytic psychosocial work in this area has been promising (Garland, 1990; Maruna et al, 2004; Gadd 2007) but as yet remains rather less than fully developed and systematic. Selective in their interpretive use of disparate psychoanalytic concepts of unconscious drives, emotions and defences, they feel ad hoc and eclectic. But we should want to be able to make sense both of the unities that are found in constellations of expressed materials, and of the antinomies that exist between different such constellations. We should want to know why and how the constellations of specific emotional and defensive elements in punishment hang together in the ways they do, and why others cannot co-exist stably, always leading to dissonance and oscillation. More fundamentally, such accounts may, to philosophical expressivism, seem suspiciously like a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' that, inspired perhaps by a Nietzschean take on Freud, is bound to entail reductively explaining away all ethical values and normative phenomena. If we can boil down punishment's manifest moral expressions to deeper, seedier latent ones, that-so the objection goes-must mean we can do the same for all moral phenomena, so that 'when, what we fondly believe to be reasons are unmasked, all that remains is blind causal processes,' (Brandom, ms.: 3) and then there is no normative purchase left on the world, and hence no grounds of critique either. Then it may seem such approaches are merely selectively debunking and pathologizing what they don't like (see Tetlock, 1994). That can lead Maruna et al., for example, to reason that if punishment or punitiveness is to be psychoanalytically ...

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Why punishment pleases: Punitive feelings in a world of hostile solidarity

Cited by 47 publications

References 61 publications

‘Three warnings and you’re out’: Banishment and precarious penality in South Africa’s informal settlements

‘Three warnings and you’re out’: Banishment and precarious penality in South Africa’s informal settlements

Difference and punishment: Ethno-political exclusion, colonial institutional legacies, and incarceration

What Punishment Expresses

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