Expert answer:Need community correction centers and aspect help
Answer & Explanation:State: Georgia1. Looking up your state (or last state of residence) department of corrections, find out how many in your state (name the state) are 1) on probation, 2) incarcerated, 3) on death row, 4) most offenses for the majority of inmates on probation AND in prison, 5) racial breakdown of those on probation and in prison. Include the link for your Department in your assignment. If you cannot find the info in your state, try the http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=112. Go to TU Library, find a research article on a current issue in corrections. This can be something from prisons, probation, community corrections, etc. It could deal with punishment, sentencing, overcrowding, etc. Do a 2+ paragraph summary of the article, giving the author, journal, date of the article, etc.For full credit, each part must be clearly answered.ARTICLE REVIEW ATTACHMENTARTICLE REVIEW.pdf
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H I S T O RY O F T H E H U M A N S C I E N C E S
Vo l . 2 0 N o . 2
© 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
pp. 51–70
[20:2; 51–70; DOI: 10.1177/0952695107076199]
Explorations into the sociology
of criminal justice and
punishment: leaving the
modernist project behind
SUSANNE KARSTEDT
ABSTRACT
Law has been a close partner to sociology from its very beginning, and
the partnership often has proven to be extremely prolific for sociology.
Grand theories as well as vital conceptual tools can be counted among
its offspring. Both disciplines share the common ground of socio-legal
studies, which has developed into a nearly independent interdisciplinary
enterprise where legal scholars and sociologists happily meander between
the normative and the analytical. From the vast array of topics in the
field of socio-legal studies I select the sociology of criminal justice and
punishment in order to demonstrate the characteristics of this relationship. The partnership between sociology and law emerged as part of the
modernization project in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the sociology
of punishment was part of this endeavour. Rooted in a strong tradition
of old (Durkheim) and new (Elias, Foucault) classics, recent developments in this field are leaving the idea of an ‘unproblematically modern
punishment’ (Whitman, 2005a) behind, and new fields of inquiry for
comparative lawyers and sociologists are opening up.
Key words comparative socio-legal studies, Emile Durkheim,
modernization project, sociology of criminal justice, sociology of
punishment
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52
HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
20(2)
SOCIOLOGY AND LAW AS CLOSE STRANGERS
If there is any discipline close to the heart of sociology, it is law. However,
this applies to law as a subject of sociological inquiry, and much less to the
discipline itself. As disciplines, sociology and law are close strangers in the
way that strangers share seats in trains, that is, with considerable uneasiness.
Notwithstanding this close but uneasy relationship, both disciplines have
established quasi-marital bonds in the field of socio-legal studies, which is
presently thriving on its own and in some perhaps sound distance from both
disciplines, law and sociology. Law and sociology it seems are engaged in
multiple relationships and partnerships, some of which can be deemed particularly prolific, while others are characterized by cautious distance up to mutual
ignorance. As a topic, law is by no means a ‘strange other’ to sociology, but
to the contrary, as an interdisciplinary partnership it is promising and thriving
(though not everywhere), and in terms of cross-disciplinary relationships, it
is characterized by more or less polite distance. After a brief overview over
these multi-faceted relationships, I will explore the relationship between
sociology and law for the sociology of criminal justice and punishment. This
field can look back at an impressive lineage of sociological classics and has a
rivalling record for recent developments. It has developed in a continuous
engagement with sociological theorizing, and has in some ways produced
classical works of sociological theory. It demonstrates how prolific the engagement with law has been for sociology during the history of the discipline.
Obviously the two partners, law and sociology, differ as to their perceptions of the strength and the fecundity of the relationship. While sociologists generally perceive of it as a valuable relationship, legal scholars tend to
have a different view, and ignorance of socio-legal studies or specifically the
sociology of punishment can be counted among the kinder reactions towards
this field. However, this tends to differ between legal systems. European
continental jurisprudence with its focus on legal doctrine is much less
inclined to engage with sociology than its common law counterparts in the
UK and particularly in the USA. Perhaps as a consequence, all the authors
of classics in the field of the sociology of punishment – Durkheim, Foucault,
and in some ways Elias – were sociologists from Europe; they developed
their theoretical ideas within sociological frameworks, and completely outside
traditional jurisprudence.
Both disciplines experience the relationship differently, due to differences
of interest in and usefulness for each other. From the start, sociology had an
immense interest in law and legal institutions. For the young discipline, law
and legal institutions represented the social process and the type of social
relationships indicative of different social orders. Studying law and the
changes of law therefore led to the inner core of society, where – likewise as
in the volcanic fires in the core of the earth – societies were shaped, forged
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT
and changed. The sociological inquiry into law seemed to be extremely well
positioned to identify those forces, and classical sociological theory often was
developed as a theory of law and legal evolution, as in the works of Durkheim,
Weber and Maine. These classics engaged with criminal law as well as with
private law, or even – like Durkheim – linked both types in their analyses.
Changes of laws and legal institutions were seen not only as precisely illuminating the process of modernization, but also as active forces that shaped the
process itself. This perspective that casts the relationship between law and
society as a two-way interaction has continuously gained in importance (e.g.
in global regulation, see Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000).
This perspective, however, was of much less interest and use to jurisprudence and lawyers, who entered the relationship equipped with a fully
fledged system of legal doctrine, in which the social order to which law was
applied did not figure prominently, if at all. Neither were they inclined to see
law as driven by wider and forceful social processes like power, nor as an
epiphenomenon reduced to the superstructure of society. Law as a discipline
was less inclined to meet sociology as it had already quite immunized itself
against interference from outside before the beginning of such an encounter
(e.g. against theology in the course of the Enlightenment), and dealt with
social facts on its own terms, which were according to its nature normative.
It is, however, notable that many legal scholars were among the founding
fathers of socio-legal studies in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries,
and they came from continental Europe as well as from the common law
countries. Obviously, the competition from the emerging discipline of social
sciences instigated sociological inquiry among legal scholars, as did the
profound changes they witnessed in society, law and legal institutions during
the 19th and 20th centuries.
Eugen Ehrlich was the first to coin the term ‘living law’ and to contrast it
with law in the books. He inaugurated the movement of legal realism, which
contended that ‘black letter law’ did not represent the ways in which law
actually was implemented and influenced society, and that the legal process
was profoundly shaped by the social process, or even part of it. In Europe,
Rudolf von Jhering and Hans Kelsen prominently contributed to the sociology of law as well as jurisprudence. In the common law countries Karl
Llewellyn, Louis D. Brandeis and Herbert Hart further developed legal
realism and are today counted among the founding fathers of socio-legal
studies. However, as much as these influenced the field of socio-legal studies
and jurisprudence, they are barely recognized in sociology proper, and are
hardly known in this discipline. In contrast, in particular Max Weber has
made important contributions to jurisprudence and has been accepted there,
in addition to being of course an overtowering figure in the field of sociolegal studies. This tradition is still alive, and contemporary social theorists
like Habermas (1992) and Luhmann (2004[1995]) have devoted major works
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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
20(2)
to the sociology of law, which have made their way into jurisprudence and
legal theory.
Consequently, the relationship between sociology and law seems to be
basically imbalanced. The profound interest of sociology in law is often met
with scepticism on the other side of the disciplinary fence. The engagement
of legal scholars with socio-legal theory has not been properly recognized by
sociologists. While sociologists see it as their genuine task to dissect the
normative, lawyers change the world by insisting on it. Human rights are
here the most obvious example (see Sjoberg, Gill and Williams, 2001). While
sociology situates law within the wider framework of social inequality and
power differentials, severely questioning its ‘independence’ from these social
forces, legal scholars take a perspective from within the law, insist on its
independence, and amend it according to its own ‘innate’ principles. More
recent sociological theories of law have much more taken account of the
jurisprudential viewpoint in this respect (Luhmann, 2004). In between them
both disciplines share the field of socio-legal studies, where lawyers and sociologists easily collaborate and share a common ground, meandering between
the normative and the analytical.
What makes law such a prominent topic for sociological inquiry? As briefly
outlined above, we can hardly find a major sociologist who did not engage
quite thoroughly with the topic of law, the most notable exceptions being
Marx and Simmel. While the former reduced law to an epiphenomenon of
the social process and its driving forces, the latter focused on the more fluid
phenomena of social order as they emerge from interpersonal interaction.
Both theoretical positions do not bring law to the centre stage of sociological inquiry. There is certainly a tradition for sociological theorists to make
law a core of their theoretical thinking, however rarely of empirical research.
The sociology of law has always been an attractive field for theory building,
but quite hard to toil for empirical research. Implicitly and explicitly, sociology as a discipline is based on the assumption that ‘human beings must be
treated as agents acting according to rule’ (Harré and Secord, 1972: 29). The
normative is sociology’s constitutive moment, and all types of norms – from
the most informal and passing ones to the ones cut in stone and written in
law books – and normative behaviours constitute sociology’s enterprise. The
inquiry into norms is at the analytical core of sociology, and law is just one
of the institutions of society where fundamental questions about the social
order can be posed.
However, this more optimistic account of the relationship between sociology and law glosses over decisive differences between legal fields, and needs
some further qualifications in the light of considerable changes during the
last decades. While the founding fathers in sociology Durkheim, Weber and
Maine brought their theoretical thinking to both fields of law, private and
criminal law, and those from jurisprudence were anyway more attracted to
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT
private law, contemporary interest of sociologists has nearly exclusively
shifted towards criminal law. Other fields, with the exception perhaps of
constitutional and international law or human rights regimes, are nearly
completely ignored by contemporary sociology, and lawyers in these fields
find it neither useful nor helpful to engage with sociology. This in a nutshell
is the conclusion that the recently released Nuffield report on Law in the Real
World. Improving our Understanding of how Law Works (Genn, Partington
and Wheeler, 2006) comes to for the United Kingdom. Consequently, the
report paints a gloomy picture as to the future of socio-legal studies and
empirical research into how the law works in this country. Why then has the
mutual engagement become so unduly focused and negligent of important
realms of the law that presumably affect even more people than criminal law?
The founding fathers in sociology profited from the then thriving field of
legal anthropology in the 19th century, which in some natural ways might
have been exhausted at the beginning of the 21st. Their work testifies to the
richness and breadth of contemporary anthropological accounts of laws and
legal institutions in very different societies and cultures. It was decisive that
legal anthropology provided material of utmost theoretical interest to those
founding fathers that fitted into their evolutionary perspectives extremely
well. Sociological theory today has not only considerably shifted away from
such grander perspectives (perhaps with the exception of globalization theory),
but it is presently thriving on concepts and frameworks that do not link easily
with all legal fields. Concepts like ‘identity’, ‘social capital’ or ‘risk society’
(Beck, 1992) as overarching concepts seem to appeal much more and directly
to research on criminal justice, where in particular the concept of risk society
has won prominence, than to research in areas of private law. Sociology in its
theoretical preoccupations has moved away from frameworks that lend themselves to covering the whole range of socio-legal analysis. However, the law
of ‘horror vacui’ equally applies to scientific disciplines, and the space that
sociology left has meanwhile been occupied by economics. Economics –
notwithstanding forays into the field of criminal justice – has more or less
crowded out sociology from the field of private law. The economic analysis
of law has situated itself as explicitly applied research – in contrast to the
approach of theoretical sociology, and has followed the model of this discipline in advising government and business on how laws will work, and which
legal device to choose in order to achieve their objectives. While criminal
justice offers to sociology the opportunity of engaging in moral debates, these
opportunities present themselves much less in other fields.
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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
20(2)
LAW AND MORALITY: INTO THE SOCIOLOGY OF
PENAL LAW AND PUNISHMENT
Law’s general embeddedness in the wide array of social norms is, however,
not lost among socio-legal scholars, as the statement of legal philosopher and
socio-legal scholar Herbert Hart (1961: 17) shows: ‘law is best understood
through its “necessary” connection with morality’. Hart did not mean that law,
morality and consensus about moral behaviour could not be disconnected at
times. What he meant was an essential connection. Even if this connection
might be obfuscated in many fields of law with highly technical content, and
is presently disputed by sociologists (see below), Hart is right: law is necessarily connected to our basic understandings and values of justice and fairness,
in terms of both procedures and outcomes, the core of which seems to be
universal across cultures (see Karstedt, 2001).1 This connection, however, is
most obvious in the case of criminal law and justice, thus making this field
particularly attractive for sociological theorizing. As Jeffrey Alexander and
Philip Smith wrote (1993: 158): ‘The conflict between good and bad functions inside of culture as an internal dynamic . . . repression, exclusion and
domination are part of the very core of the evaluative system itself. It is for
this reason that . . . transgression and purification are key rituals in social
life.’ As such, crime and its control in the form of variegated sanctions are
expressions and illuminations of the wider culture and structure of society
(Nelken, 1994: 223, 225), and it is through this lens that the social order and
its ‘very core’ can be understood. It is precisely because of their analytical
potential for sociological inquiry that penal laws and criminal punishment
have formed the foundation on which two classic sociological writers built
their theories: Durkheim and Foucault. Elias contributed in a different way
by laying the groundwork through his ‘Civilizing Process’ for studies of
historical and contemporary punishment by a number of outstanding authors
(e.g. Pratt, 2002).
What these classics have in common is a focus on what might be termed
the ‘mentalities’ of members of a social group or society, and the ways in
which these are represented by penal law and punishment. Durkheim’s collective conscience stresses the shared morality of a group, the shared meanings
of good and evil, and the shared practices of social control and punishment.
He uses both punishment and crime to show in which ways the deeper layers
of affective-moral forces function in society (see also Karstedt, 2006).
Foucault’s focus is on the state’s power to punish: punishment is a relationship of power and as such it is part of the micro-physics of power as it is
inscribed onto bodies and minds. For him, the moral-affective forces of
society are embedded in the relationship between state and society, and the
forms of punishment are representative of the particular mentalities of
governance that are generated by this relationship (see Garland, 1990: chs 6
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT
and 7). Elias’s influence on the recent development of the sociology of punishment is owed to his particular perspective on how the moral-affective forces
were shaped in a civilizing process that affected society as well as its relationship with the state (and vice versa). The process in which civilized sensibilities
and mentalities are generated, is epitomized by the secular trend of decreasing
violence (Eisner, 2003), both in terms of the violence of criminal punishment
and the level of interpersonal violence (e.g. Pratt, 2002; Fletcher, 1997).
According to these classical theories, penal law and punishment are shaped
by broad social and cultural forces; punishment is the effect of these forces,
and they explain its shape, severity, target, institutional forms and changes.
However, as Garland (1990: 249) points out, this is an interactive relationship.
Punishment also generates its own meanings, and shapes the affective-moral
forces in ‘a small but significant way’. It is in particular the symbolic meaning
of criminal punishment that it adds to the reservoir of the values and meanings
constituting culture, which are entrenched in a specific cultural identity.
Lynchings in many ways defined society in the US South (Garland, 2005),
Finland asserted its Scandinavian identity through considerably decreasing
its incarceration rates to nearly the lowest in Europe (Christie, quoted in
Karstedt, 2001), and the abolition of the death penalty figures prominently
in today’s European identity (Girling, 2006).
The classics of the sociology of punishment further have in common that
their method is historical and comparative. Both Durkheim and Elias embrace
the ‘long view’ in following the pathways towards modernity and the development of typically modern forms of punishment. Foucault chooses a defining
moment in the history of punishment, the ‘birth of the prison’, to develop his
genealogy and theoretical tools within the framework of an institutional
analysis. For all, the present functions as a subterranean lead to the past (and
back). Thus, at the time when Foucault was writing, a certain style of bureaucratic punishment seemed to establish itself everywhere (at least in the
developed countries). It was still possible even for Foucault, …
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