Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'. This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.

The political economy of punishment suggests that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies: in this respect, each 'mode of production' knows its peculiar 'modes of punishment'. However, global processes of transformation have revolutionized industrial capitalism since the early 1970s, thus configuring a post-Fordist system of production. In this book, the author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies. Current penal politics can be seen as part of a broader project to control this labour force, with far-reaching effects on the role of the prison and punitive strategies in general.

What punishment theorists have termed "proportionality"--Where the response to crime is well-suited to the crime itself -- I frame as a problem of economic coordination. Providing criminal justice proportionately is a task of social coordination that must confront both knowledge and incentive problems simultaneously. This dissertation begins by surveying the potential for cross-disciplinary work in the economic-sociology of criminal punishment. Next I analyze today's criminal punishment system on two margins: it's ability to overcome Hayekian knowledge problems and its ability to avoid Public Choice-styled rent-seeking and capture. I conclude that centrally-planned criminal justice institutions are ineffective at solving knowledge and incentive problems to produce proportionate punishments. I argue that markets tend to promote proportionate allocations of goods and services in similar fashions as the term proportionality is used by criminal justice theorists. In this sense there is good reason to believe that market provided criminal justice services would better satisfy the ends of proportionality compared to central-planning

The project of interpreting contemporary forms of punishment means exploring the social, political, economic, and historical conditions in the society in which those forms arise. The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society draws together this disparate and expansive field of punishment and society into one compelling new volume. Headed by two of the leading scholars in the field, Jonathan Simon and Richard Sparks have crafted a comprehensive and definitive resource that illuminates some of the key themes in this complex area - from historical and prospective issues to penal trends and related contributions through theory, literature and philosophy. Incorporating a stellar and international line-up of contributors the book addresses issues such as: capital punishment, the civilising process, gender, diversity, inequality, power, human rights and neoliberalism. This engaging, vibrantly written collection will be captivating reading for academics and researchers in criminology, penology, criminal justice, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy and politics.

Why are certain methods of punishment adopted or rejected in a given social situation? To what extent is the development of penal methods determined by basic social relations? The answers to these questions are complex, and go well beyond the thesis that institutionalized punishment is simply for the protection of society. While today's punishment of offenders often incorporates aspects of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, at one time there was a more pronounced difference in criminal punishment based on class and economics. Punishment and Social Structure originated from an article written by Georg Rusche in 1933 entitled "Labor Market and Penal Sanction: Thoughts on the Sociology of Criminal Justice." Originally published in Germany by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, this article became the germ of a theory of criminology that laid the groundwork for all subsequent research in this area. Rusche and Kirchheimer look at crime from an historical perspective, and correlate methods of punishment with both temporal cultural values and economic conditions. The authors classify the history of crime into three primary eras: the early Middle Ages, in which penance and fines were the predominant modes of punishment; the later Middle Ages, in which harsh corporal punishment and capital punishment moved to the forefront; and the seventeenth century, in which the prison system was more fully developed. They also discuss more recent forms of penal practice, most notably under the constraints of a fascist state.The majority of the book was translated from German into English, and then reshaped by Rusche's co-author, Otto Kirchheimer, with whom Rusche actually had little discussion. While the main body of Punishment and Social Structure are Rusche's ideas, Kirchheimer was responsible for bringing the book more up-to-date to include the Nazi and fascist era. Punishment and Social Structure is a pioneering work that sets a paradigm for the study of crime and punishment.

This book presents a feminist historical materialist analysis of the ways in which the law, policing and penal regimes have overlapped with social policies to coercively discipline the poor and marginalized sectors of the population throughout the history of capitalism. Roberts argues that capitalism has always been underpinned by the use of state power to discursively construct and materially manage those sectors of the population who are most resistant to and marginalized by the instantiation and deepening of capitalism. The book reveals that the law, along with social welfare regimes, have operated in ways that are highly gendered, as gender – along with race – has been a key axis along which difference has been constructed and regulated. It offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution that disrupts the tendency for mainstream and critical work within IPE to view capitalism primarily as an economic relation. Roberts also provides a feminist critique of the failure of mainstream and critical scholars to analyse the gendered nature of capitalist social relations of production and social reproduction. Exploring a range of issues related to the nature of the capitalist state, the creation and protection of private property, the governance of poverty, the structural compulsions underpinning waged work and the place of women in paid and unpaid labour, this book is of great use to students and scholars of IPE, gender studies, social work, law, sociology, criminology, global development studies, political science and history.

An incisive, eminently readable study of the evolving relationship between punishment and social order

Arguing that penal institutions are social and cultural artefacts as well as techniques of crime control, this book explores how penality interacts with a variety of social forces including strategies of power, socio-economic structures and cultural sensibilities.