The Political History of Punishment: Who Feels Retributive?

A few recent posts have discussed the idea of retribution – the conviction that regardless of what benefit it might secure, for them or others, those who have done something wrong should suffer for it (or should be punished for it – is there a difference?)

The discussion so far has been largely ahistorical, abstracted from any particular social realities. In this post I want to change that by asking: what is the class significance of retribution as an idea? Does it characterise the attitude of any particular social groups more than others? And how might this have changed over time?

I also have in mind, when asking this, some recent posts about Foucault and his account of the ‘genealogy’ of punishment – and, behind that, the earlier ‘Genealogy of Morals‘ by Nietzsche.

How I want to proceed is by laying out some postulates, which you need not think are true, and then drawing out what they would predict, and observing that it (I think) seems to match up with a lot of what we do observe.

The Psychology of Punishment: What makes us retributive?

In a recent post I argued that the retributive conception of punishment, though it can make sense in particular cases, from certain perspectives, is overall incoherent and confused, and we should aim for a situation where it has no hold on people. But this will remain a meaninglessly abstract piece of moralism unless it is translated into political and historical terms. So let’s do that.

I think this will require a psychological treatment – though this doesn’t in itself make what we speak of ‘subjective’, any more than a psychology of what factors affect people’s understanding of mathematics makes maths subjective. EDIT: so the psychological remarks ended up taking the whole post. That’s ok. Political stuff coming next post then. Stay tuned!

What factors will influence people’s tendency towards retributive feelings?

1) Most fundamentally, the confidence of the victim in their own worth (or whatever exactly the ‘crime’ has denied) makes retribution seem less necessary. Why do I need to ‘teach them a lesson’ if I’m really sure of the content of that lesson? At that point the ‘teaching’ simply becomes rehabilitation. To put it another way, inner strength makes forgiveness proportionately more possible.

2) In relation to particular actions, the extent to which someone’s identity is invested in what is denied and ignored by that action – what strikes at our heart makes more of an impact than what, though it might harm us, leaves our sense of ourselves and the world untouched. But this will tend to average out across people, I think.

3) The more the ‘dignity’ and ‘moral authority’, that must be defended and vindicated, is bound up with actual power, real or desired, the more sense retribution will make – because though beatings and cagings are crude instruments for demonstrating moral truths to be, they are very good at demonstrating power.

The Justification of Punishment: An Internal Critique of Retribution

In my last post I discussed why I thought that retributive theories of punishment should best be seen as aiming at a sort of ‘communication’, and that this might make them seem queer compared to other theories.

I realised that it might be worth saying more clearly what sort of communication I take retribution to be. In essence, the conversation I think is imagined to go like this: person X performs action A, and in doing so ‘says’ that action A is a reasonable to do (for them, on that occasion, at least). But! Action A is in fact ‘bad’, perhaps because it makes someone else die. Consequently person X’s initial ‘statement’ is false. By punishment, we do something ‘bad’ to person X (forcing them to become aware of some ‘badness’), and present this as directly tied to action A – so they now ‘perceive action A as bad’.

This account may seem very sloppy, but I don’t think it’s sloppier than the reality – the key concept here, after all, seems to be ‘bad’, which is not known for its precision. We can certainly attempt a critique of this, and I will in just a moment.

But first, notice how subtly different sorts of motivation can be very close to each other here. The punisher is motivated by a desire to ‘reaffirm’ that action A was bad, but this can be for a range of reasons. It might be out of concern for ‘moral law’ in the abstract, or for divine law. But it also might just be about personal status. Say action A is a form of ‘disrespect’ against me. The statement being made then (setting aside ambiguities of interpretation) is that I am not worthy of respect.

The motivation to ‘punish’ would then be not so much ‘moral’ as just a desire to affirm that I am worthy of respect. This is sometimes said pretty much literally: “I’ll teach you a lesson!” What lesson? “Nobody messes with Alderson Motherfucking Warm-Fork!” Is this motive ‘better’ or ‘worse’? An entirely open question – for the circumstances that make someone feel disrespected are so varied.

But let’s get to the point. Does this idea of the retributive ‘lesson’, which seeks to communicate to person X that ‘action A was bad’ by making it the cause of suffering for X, does it make any sense? Should it be endorsed?

The Real Basis of Punishment: Retribution as Communication

Imagine you’re discussing something with someone and then, just after you make a point that they think is foolish, they slap you in the face and tell you to stop being silly. Perhaps they jokingly wag their finger at you. Then they continue the discussion. What do you do?

I can’t speak for everyone, but I think one common reaction would be an outrage out of all proportion to the actual pain suffered, and based instead on a feeling of humiliation and disrespect. The desire this might produce could be expressed principally as ‘desire that things not go on as normal’. Maybe you slap them back, or shout at them, or leave immediately. In each case, the goal is (at least in part) to ‘mark’ the unacceptability of that action – or to put it another way, to ‘refute’ the ‘message’ that the action expressed, namely that it’s ok for this person to do that.

That is, the action taken in response would be not aimed at producing any effect, not at causal power, but would be communicative. Its rationale would be as part of an ongoing ‘discourse’ about how to act. If somebody watching had assumed that actions all ‘aim at ends’ in the sense of some result they produce, or was in another way committed to looking at actions as actions, and not as assertions, then they might well be confused, and find it hard to make sense of your response. What did it acheive?

This, I think, is what is often going on in discussions about ‘justifications for punishment’. There are broadly two sorts of theories about why we punish/why we should punish/whatever – I want to consider the debates without implying endorsement of any of their assumptions, let alone their real applications and history. Some say ‘it’s useful’ – whether by ‘deterrence’, ‘incapacitation’, or ‘rehabilitation’, it aims at some sort of good. The other says ‘it’s deserved’, or ‘it’s proportionate’ or ‘it’s justice’.

Foucault, Humanitarianism and the Will-to-Power

This is the first post that’s coming out of my attempt to read ‘Discipline and Punish‘ by Michel Foucault. I want to start with the broadest idea of the book: an analysis of how our attitudes to and methods of punishment have changed in the emergence of modern society.

Foucault’s story is like this: in the previous ideology of punishment, the criminal appeared as something outside of and opposed to the social body – that social body being identified with the body of the king. The function of punishment was to reaffirm the superiority of the sovereign body over the criminal’s body by destroying it; the more complete the destruction, the more effective. Hence criminals taken out in public, tortured, dismembered, and finally executed.

In the currently ascendant ideology of punishment, the criminal appeared as always still a part of the social body, but a malfunctioning and diseased part (partly because the social body was now the nation and the people, not the sovereign). So now the function of punishment is to restore it to health – to strengthen and clean society.

Some key consequences of this new approach to punishment: that rather than seeking excess (after all, to rip off someone’s flesh with pincers, and kill them, and then string out their guts, is pretty excessive) it had to seek balance between two opposed imperatives. On the one hand, to attack and harm (after all, that’s what punishment is), but on the other, to respect and preserve the criminal (for they must eventually be returned to society in ‘mended’ form).

Secondly, knowledge of the criminal now becomes vital – detailed understanding so that they can be changed both inside and outside. This again tells against ‘excess’ and ‘violence’, because they might disrupt the collection of systematic data. The prison thus appears as the paradigm of punishment it preserves a symbolic ‘something’ about the prisoner that is not violated (they can keep their bodily integrity as long as they follow the regulations) and because its regimented, drawn-out nature allows for the collection of detailed information, the detailed composition of schedules and regulations, and the endeavour of trying to ‘fix’ the defective human being.

That’s how Foucault presents matters – and in many respects this account is not too different from the conventional liberal story. As society became more ‘civilised’, its efforts at punishment shifted away from being motivated by base motives of vengeance and cruelty, and came to embrace ‘humanitarian’ punishment that respected the ‘rights’ and ‘dignity’ of the criminal, along with seeking to ‘understand’ them so as to ‘rehabilitate’ them.

Why Does the West Not Cane or Whip People In Public?

This post is very un-thought-through – everything in it is offered mainly to stimulate thought, not to convey my own beliefs (after all, I’m an anarchist, so my thoughts on punishment are hardly going to be mainstream).

One hears sometimes stories of people in other countries by sentenced by a court to be whipped or caned in public. Apparently, this is practiced in one form or another in about 30 different countries – all in either Africa, Asia, or the Caribbean. In ‘the west’, i.e. Europe and North America (also, it seems, Latin America) such a thing is never done – at least to adults.

Not only is it not done, but it often provokes shock and horror. Isn’t that barbaric? As a related fact, we are also entirely opposed to any sort of punitive mutilation, such as the amputation of a hand, or castration, or branding.

The reason for this is not entirely obvious at first sight. ‘We’ (that is, the general Western public) are quite happy to have people locked in cages – some of us are even happy for it to be indefinite, or solitary for long periods. Why is there such a big difference between controlling someone’s movements and just beating them?

One obvious argument for why we’re against mutilation is that it’s so permanent, and we want to affirm the possibility of rehabilitation – that punishment shouldn’t determine the whole of your life. But this seems to imply that we should be very keen on corporal punishment – because a beating, even a severe one, is less ‘lasting’ than most forms of imprisonment.

Reinforcing this, is the possibility that a beating might be considered substantially preferable to imprisonment by some (or most?) of the actual recipients of the punishment. It’s over quickly, it doesn’t impact so much on your ability to carry on your other projects. It’s less likely to destroy your relationships through prolonged absence, it has less effect on your children.

A Socialist Reading of Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals” – Part 2

A while ago I posted about the first section of Friedrich Nitzsche’s famous work, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, talking about how socialists might take the useful ideas from this rabidly anti-socialist thinker and use them for illumination, while criticising Nietzsche’s conclusions on his own terms.

So now I figured I might as well complete the series with posts on the second and third sections of that work. So here’s section 2 – which announces itself as being about guilt, justice, and punishment.

Nietzsche begins however by posing a surprising and unfamiliar question: how is it possible to breed an animal that can promise? A two-year-old child, or a cat, or a monkey, seem to be simply incapable of promising – whatever promise a two-year-old expresses now, we can put no weight on it, cannot accept it as a guarantee of the future.

And yet with adult humans, it seems, we can. How is this possible, if the latter developed out of the former – the growth of the child of course is largely governed by society, but this pushes the question back to how such a human society is possible on the basis of the monkey societies it evolved out of?

The Dialectic of Easter

I posted a couple of days ago about Passover, and since Easter is probably celebrated by about a thousand times as many people, including, in a superficial chocolate-related way, me, I felt I might as well comment on that too.

In the discussion of Passover, I argued that the God presented is notably un-transcendent: rather than breaking out of the cycle of bloodshed, vengeance, sacrifice, power, powerlessness, etc., He remains within it. The violence of the Egyptians against the Israelites is reflected in God’s violence against them; the oppression of the Israelites by Egyptians is replaced with their oppression by other Israelites; the murderous wrath of God is averted only by the murder of a lamb as substitute.

Now, on one level, the key story of Easter, of the Atonement for humanity’s sins by the sacrifice of Jesus, also works from within this cycle. Jesus is simply a new version of the sacrificial lamb: in order to avert the violence of God’s anger at human sins, a different victim must be found to suffer.

But on the other hand, the outcome is in a sense the ‘short-circuiting’ of that cycle. Afterwards, human crimes don’t need to produce Godly counter-crimes acts of punishment. They can be forgiven, ‘washed away’ by Jesus. A ‘personal relationship’ can reconcile the sinful human with an angry God, without the need for violence. The punishment need not be borne, because God has taken it upon himself.

This is a perfect example of ‘dialectic’ in the sense that Hegel and Marx use. We might say that the power-and-bloodshed cycle is ‘short-circuited’ by the Atonement.