NCJ Number
199038
Journal
Theoretical Criminology Volume: 7 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2003 Pages: 5-28
Editor(s)
Lynn Chancer,
Tony Jefferson
Date Published
February 2003
Length
24 pages
Annotation
This article reviews David Garland’s work on the sociology of punishment; its useful insights and methodologic inexplicitness, providing a critique of the history of the penal present.
Abstract
In this article, the author critiques the work of David Garland, a leading contemporary thinker of the sociology of punishment. Garland’s work focuses on societal choices of whether and how to punish. The critique focuses on the choices Garland makes and the lack of methodological explicitness. An attempt is made to show that Garland's Punishment and Welfare project is really a punishment of poor project. It argues a genealogy of punishment or a genealogy of crime control. A problem in Garland’s genealogy method is that branches of the genealogy are sawn off, the branches where the chosen instruments of regulation decentre punishment. The form such a genealogy might take is explained in the history of tax enforcement, intellectual property regulation, regulation of drug markets, antitrust corporation, and securities regulation. In conclusion, the history of the present that traces a genealogy of punishment only through its criminal justice branches might offer inferior insights to a genealogy of regulation opening eyes to the ways business regulatory and criminal justice branches of the genealogy intertwine. References