Use of Punishment.

Vol. 14 No. 8 (August 2004), pp.606-608

USE OF PUNISHMENT, by Sean McConville (ed.). Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2003. 304pp. Paperback. £25.00 / US $34.95. ISBN: 1-84392-033-6. Hardback. £45.00 / US $59.95. ISBN: 1-84392-034-4.

Reviewed by William Lyons, Department of Political Science, University of Akron. Email: wtlyons@uakron.edu

USE OF PUNISHMENT brings together eight very different essays on crime, punishment and penal policy making. As the editor notes, “No one line of approach has been taken, and it will be found that the authors differ in backgrounds and disciplines and also in philosophical and political stances. All the essays have attended to the complexity of the various arguments, have a cautiousness about contradictions in penal thought and a reluctance to draw apparently straightforward and facile conclusions. All are aware of the volatility of penal thought and its susceptibility to be influenced by and employed in the see-saws of party politics” (p.8). This diverse collection does, as claimed, bring the analytical tools of several disciplines to bear on “the volatility of penal thought,” but with mixed results. The uneven quality of these essays unfortunately injects an additional volatility that, in the end, weakens the analytical utility of the collection as a whole.

The introductory essay is more a list of rhetorical questions than a carefully constructed argument synthesizing, or otherwise providing a unifying analytical framework for, the volume. This essay misses an opportunity to persuasively place the voices in the volume within significant ongoing conversations about crime and punishment. Here and in his concluding essay, the editor mentions an enormously diverse set of literatures, but what might have been complex and cautious analyses all too often left this reader confused.

“A Christian Approach to Punishment” is an effort to use the author’s fascinating personal reflections (as a long time prison chaplain) to interrogate the intersections of scholarly and theological debates over justifications for punishment. In this essay, the author alternates from unexamined assertions about religious truths, objective standards, the essence of mercy and penance or accountability, and “classic theories of punishment which are used as day-to-day yardsticks in the application of justice” (p.43), to punishingly vague references to competing positions without an effort to reconcile numerous tensions. In my view, readers can only be left with a less coherent understanding of what a Christian approach to punishment might be.

“Punishment: A Psycholgical Perspective” provides a much more thoughtful, and more carefully defended, review of psychological findings on the effects of punishment on children and learning, arguing “that punishment often has both stimulating and suppressing effects on aggressive and antisocial human behavior,” challenging the “many common assumptions that the public and criminal justice authorities make about the [*607] effects of punishment” (p.55). In a discursive formulation that initially sounds consequentialist, but is not necessarily inconsistent with a retributivist’s focus on punishment as a deserved response to behavior inconsistent with community norms, this essay begins with the premise that “antisocial behavior is learned” (p.57) and can, therefore, be both unlearned and less vigorously taught. The authors argue persuasively that understanding what we know about how children learn offers one powerful framework for thinking about crime, punishment and penal policy. As they put it, “a large number of originally neutral stimuli may have acquired reinforcing or punishing properties of which most others are unaware. Just the sight of some people or things may be punishing or reinforcing. School may have become punishing for some kids. . . . [Further] many punishments are themselves examples of aggressive behavior and therefore can be expected to teach aggressive behavior to the person being punished” (pp.63-66). Aggression is constructed as an acceptable, effective, and first-resort approach to conflict management when role models, teachers, parents and other adults choose punitive approaches to the conflicts they encounter, particularly conflicts involving children.

“Lost Youth and the Futility of Deterrence” argues that a deterrence-based gang strategy fails because gang members do not share mainstream community notions about the menu of punishments routinely deployed against them by the adults in their lives. He finds that their reactions to imprisonment range from apathetic to ironic, making the “cost of criminal behavior low and benefits of a gang lifestyle high” (p.102). The author favors “comprehensive early intervention programmes” over punishment, but this essay provides nearly no relevant data to defend persuasively the notion that these types of preventive investments will work better. I am inclined to support the author’s policy prescription (comprehensive early intervention) and I strongly support the author’s approach (ethnographic research), but the text simply fails to provide evidence to support the claims made, substantially reducing the potential significance of this essay.

“Punishment, Markets, and the American Model” provides a thoughtful, if inconclusive, economic analysis of punishment that suffers from a shortage of citations and from being framed at the level of an Introduction to Economics lecture for first-year college students. This piece may introduce non-economists to economic analysis, but it does not sufficiently attend to the complexities of competing arguments or political controversies and tends to be rather incautious about the contradictions that accompany its, perhaps inadvertently polemical, assertions.

“States of Insecurity” seeks to examine the political dynamics of punitive populism. Readers will likely find most of the material in this essay both exceedingly familiar and thoughtful enough to justify a close read. It is provocative, dense, and synthetic. “There is an apparently remorseless tendency for crime and punishment to assume an ever more central position in electoral campaigns and domestic policy [*607] agendas, and for soundings of public opinion to provide ostensible endorsement for punitive strategies, including the death penalty and other tokens of severity along with their similarly well known slogans and sound-bites” (p.160). As the author points out, this remorseless “propensity to reach for punitive rhetoric” (p.169) is a sign of weakness rather than strength. Like teaching through aggressive conflict management, this may not only be a sign of current weakness, impatience, or frustration, but it may also be amplifying and enabling aggressive, antisocial, and counterproductive approaches to conflict management in the future, constructing a cycle where increasingly extreme forms of state punishment are justified as legitimation even as they undermine public safety.

The two remaining essays in the volume, “Penal Theory and Penal Practice: A Communitarian Approach” and “Restorative Justice and Punishment,” both provide thoughtful, if somewhat basic, overviews of this important new development in the use of punishment. The first of the two offers a very readable and illuminating description of the strengths and potential weaknesses of a communitarian approach to punishment. The other essay describes itself as a text that will “consider the development of restorative justice, its applications, its relationship with state justice, its relationship with vengeance and punishment, and some interconnected philosophical issues” (p.201). What follows is an even-handed and analytical description of the competing approaches to restorative justice and a discussion of the “punitive bite” of restorative justice that highlights critical political, legal, and bureaucratic strategies for advancing the restorative justice agenda, including strategies for derailing prevailing constructions of public opinion and (re)constructing public opinion in ways that might support a less punitive approach.

Taken as a whole I can only tepidly recommend this volume. Several of the essays are strong and worth reading, but nearly as many are disappointing, made even more so by the absence of a coherent analytical framework for the volume as a whole.

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