Punishment and Welfare

Punishment and Welfare
Author: David Garland
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-01-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1610273788

First published in 1985, this classic of law and society scholarship continues to shape the research agenda of today’s sociology of punishment. It is now republished with a new Preface by the author. Punishment and Welfare explores the relation of punishment to politics, the historical formation and development of criminology, and the way in which penal reform grew out of the complex set of political projects that founded the modern welfare state. Its analyses powerfully illuminate many of the central problems of contemporary penal and welfare policy, showing how these problems grew out of political struggles and theoretical debates that occurred in the first years of the 20th century. In conducting this investigation, David Garland developed a method of research which combines detailed historical and textual analysis with a broader sociological vision, thereby synthesizing two forms of analysis that are more often developed in isolation. The resulting genealogy will interest everyone who works in this field. “… a brilliant book … the main arguments of Punishment and Welfare are undoubtedly some of the most tenacious and exciting to emerge from the field of criminology in many years.” — Piers Bierne, Contemporary Sociology “… one of the most important pieces of work ever to emerge in British criminology. It is a study of depth, subtlety and complexity … Garland’s integration of close historical details with a broader sociological vision provides a model methodology….” — Stan Cohen, British Journal of Criminology “This study shows how early 20th-century penal policy was a function of the nation’s social welfare practices. Garland’s theory is as applicable to the 21st century as it is to that earlier era: A tour de force.” — Malcolm Feeley, University of California–Berkeley

Welfare and Punishment

Welfare and Punishment
Author: Ian Cummins
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2022-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529203937

From Margaret Thatcher’s first government to austerity politics, Ian Cummins traces changing attitudes to imprisonment and the social state. With fresh insights and critical thinking, he demonstrates how increasingly punitive approaches to crime and welfare have shaped the neoliberal economy and created stigma around those living in poverty.

The Upper Limit

The Upper Limit
Author: François Bonnet
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520973305

Since 1993, crime in the United States has fallen to historic lows, seeming to legitimize the country’s mix of welfare reform and mass incarceration. The Upper Limit explains how this unusual mix came about, examining how, beginning in the 1970s, declining living standards for the poor have defined social and penal policy in the United States, making welfare more restrictive and punishment harsher. François Bonnet shows how low-wage work sets the upper limit of social and penal policy, where welfare must be less attractive than low-wage work and criminal life must be less attractive than welfare. In essence, the living standards of the lowest class of workers in a society determine the upper limit for the generosity of welfare and for the humanity of punishment in that society. The Upper Limit explores the local consequences of this punitive adjustment in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood where crime fell in the 1990s. Bonnet argues that no meaningful penal reform can happen unless living standards and the minimum wage rise again. Enlightening and provocative, The Upper Limit provides a comprehensive theory of the evolution of social and penal policy.

Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare
Author: Adrienne Roberts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134880138

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.

Beyond the Prison Gates

Beyond the Prison Gates
Author: Warren Rosenblum
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1469606763

Germany today has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the industrialized world, and social welfare principles play an essential role at all levels of the German criminal justice system. Warren Rosenblum examines the roots of this social approach to criminal policy in the reform movements of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, when reformers strove to replace state institutions of control and incarceration with private institutions of protective supervision. Reformers believed that private charities and volunteers could diagnose and treat social pathologies in a way that coercive state institutions could not. The expansion of welfare for criminals set the stage for a more economical system of punishment, Rosenblum argues, but it also opened the door to new, more expansive controls over individuals marked as "asocial." With the reformers' success, the issue of who had power over welfare became increasingly controversial and dangerous. Other historians have suggested that the triumph of eugenics in the 1890s was predicated upon the abandonment of liberal and Christian assumptions about human malleability. Rosenblum demonstrates, however, that the turn to "criminal biology" was not a reaction against social reform, but rather an effort to rescue its legitimacy.

The Upper Limit

The Upper Limit
Author: François Bonnet
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2019-07-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520305221

Since 1993, crime in the United States has fallen to historic lows, seeming to legitimize the country’s mix of welfare reform and mass incarceration. The Upper Limit explains how this unusual mix came about, examining how, beginning in the 1970s, declining living standards for the poor have defined social and penal policy in the United States, making welfare more restrictive and punishment harsher. François Bonnet shows how low-wage work sets the upper limit of social and penal policy, where welfare must be less attractive than low-wage work and criminal life must be less attractive than welfare. In essence, the living standards of the lowest class of workers in a society determine the upper limit for the generosity of welfare and for the humanity of punishment in that society. The Upper Limit explores the local consequences of this punitive adjustment in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood where crime fell in the 1990s. Bonnet argues that no meaningful penal reform can happen unless living standards and the minimum wage rise again. Enlightening and provocative, The Upper Limit provides a comprehensive theory of the evolution of social and penal policy.

Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice

Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice
Author: Peter Scharff Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137585293

This book draws on historical and cross-disciplinary studies to critically examine penal practices in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are often hailed by international observers as ‘model societies’, with egalitarian welfare policies, low rates of poverty, humane social policies and human rights oriented internal agendas. This book, however, paints a much more nuanced picture of the welfare policies, ideologies and social control in strong centralistic states. Based on extensive new empirical data, leading Nordic and international scholars discuss the relationship between prison conditions in Scandinavia and Scandinavian social policy more generally, and argue that it is not always liberating and constructive to be embraced by a powerful welfare state. This book is essential reading for researchers of state punishment in Scandinavia, and it is highly relevant for anyone interested in the ‘Nordic Model’ of social policy.

Getting Tough

Getting Tough
Author: Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400885183

The politics and policies that led to America's expansion of the penal system and reduction of welfare programs In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force. Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.

Punishment and Inequality in America

Punishment and Inequality in America
Author: Bruce Western
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2006-05-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610445554

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.