Abstract
Rob Canton's book Punishment, a new addition to Routledge's Key Ideas in Criminology series, provides a wide-ranging account of the idea of punishment, both as an abstract idea and as a set of concrete social practices. Canton's argument is built around three under-appreciated points about the nature of criminal punishment. First, punishment is a reaction to a wrong. It is not only an extension of the Welfare State, but a collective response to (what the State claims is) a serious moral lapse. As a result, punishment is, secondly, inherently emotional, and these emotions condition the meanings, aims and politics of penal institutions and processes. Thirdly, and as noted above, punishment is also an inherently human process – it engages penal subjects, practitioners such as prison or probation staff, victims, third parties such as subjects’ families and friends, and indeed, the societies that observe the act of punishing.
Canton structures his argument around five core elements of punishment: its definition and broader meanings as a concept; a theorisation of punishment in terms of socio-political power, hegemony and emotions; an overview of penal institutions and practices as they operate in contemporary societies like England and Wales; a review of the experiences of punishment – both by penal subjects and by the criminal justice professionals who implement their punishments; and finally, a study of the various ways by which punishment ends, formally or informally. Canton then concludes on the relationship between punishment, the emotional meanings and significances that it carries, and the pursuit of the good society.
Canton's central argument is that, since punishment is inevitably bound up with (conduct that is labelled as) ‘wrongdoing’, it inevitably invokes a range of negative emotions, and especially anger, fear and disgust at that wrongdoing – and thus, at wrongdoers. Punishment can be said to have legitimacy only when it satisfies those emotions, and this helps to explain some of the tendencies in contemporary penal policy, such as the over-focus on prison and preventive strategies in punishment more generally. However, punishment cannot really satisfy these emotions. Strategies such as retribution and rehabilitation only ever really focus on the offender and fail to really speak to wider communities in a way that can meaningfully resolve the disputes at the core of crimes. Accordingly, punishments are often perceived as less legitimate by their publics, and penal subjects remain distrusted and stigmatised long after the formal end of a penalty.
To resolve this, Canton argues that we should focus not so much on offender-focussed rehabilitation, or on encouraging victims to unilaterally forgive, but rather efforts to foster communal reconciliation, including through formal rituals that mark the ‘cleansing’ of the wrongdoer and their return to full membership of society. Only then is the criminal justice system likely to satisfy the dominant penal emotions (which must also be confronted with competing sentiments, like sadness, pity, and solidarity) while also achieving some broader socio-moral good.
This is, suffice it to say, a very ambitious argument, especially in such a slim volume. While Canton broadly achieves these ambitions, on occasion the book struggles to clearly separate out its descriptive (‘this is what’), explanatory (‘this is why’), and normative (‘this is what we should’) arguments. Whereas Canton draws these themes together in his conclusion, at times the analysis is not always clear as to what sort of claim is being made. For instance, throughout the book Canton talks of ‘crime’, ‘offenders’, and the causes of crime, which he repeatedly connects to social deprivation and minoritised racial background. This is descriptively true in jurisdictions like England and Wales. However, at times the analysis seems to go beyond merely describing contemporary trends into providing an explanation for (all) crime. In doing so, the text appears to endorse a very middle-class, conventional understanding of crime, criminals and the causes of offending (or desisting from offending). Such generalisations tend to obscure other types of offenders, especially those who are more likely to commit white-collar crimes and other ‘crimes of the powerful’. As a result, we lose the opportunity to consider how Canton's emotions of punishment might apply differently to different sorts of offenders, with different pre-existing communal relationships and degrees of privilege.
Similarly, in Chapter 3, where Canton explores the use of various custodial and non-custodial sentences in terms of the emotions of anger, fear and disgust. His argument is that non-custodial sentences have struggled to achieve popular legitimacy, and forced to ‘toughen up’ and shift focus prevention, in part because they less ably satisfy these emotions than prison. Again, this analysis holds true descriptively for the evolution of punishments in England and Wales (and indeed elsewhere), but at times it seems to present these emotional resonances as immutable truths, rather than just current political reality. This can read as a council of despair for attempts to replace, or even to reduce reliance on the prison, and to ignore the way in which emotional responses to punishments change over time. After all, imprisonment was itself a replacement for the death penalty and transportation. One wonders how the emotional meaning of this change in penal institutions was navigated, and whether there is anything that can be learned from that in terms of how to justify non-custodial punishment to a contemporary public that seems so addicted to incarceration.
Indeed, the risk of focussing too much on the emotional meanings with which punishment is pregnant, and which it serves in turn, risks reifying those emotions in a more general sense. Although Chapter 2 of Canton's book addresses power and hegemony, the rest of the book does rather little with these concepts. As a result, Canton loses the opportunity for more nuanced engagement with the interplay between emotion and power. To what extent are emotions like anger, disgust and fear inevitable responses to crime – at all, or in the forms that they tend to take in contemporary society? What roles does political power play in manipulating and confecting these responses – and how might that help us to change emotional narratives about crime and punishment in future? It would have been fascinating to explore these ideas more fully, and one can only hope that Canton pursues them further in future research.
The points that I have raised here do not undermine the claims in Canton's book, so much as they complicate them. On the whole, the book is admirable in its breadth and scope, lucid in its analysis, and approachable in its tone and language. Canton's perspective is consistently moral, humane, and principled, guiding readers to challenging thoughts about the most fundamental aspects of criminal punishment. While it will be of particular interest to students and introductory readers, the book raises important issues that will be of interest to scholars and penal practitioners of all levels.