Against Prisons: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

To cut out corporal punishment and to question the necessity and legitimacy of the prison is a risky thing to do. It touches the archtypes of punishment and invariably puts into question the soundness of underlying concepts. Will a criminal justice system without the prison still be a real criminal justice system? Can, what is left over as sanctions, justly be called a punishment? If we can do without prisons - can't we just renounce punishment in general? Is punishment really a social and ethical necessity? Once there, our conventional notions of "crime and punishment" might begin to crumble, leading us to question the very concepts of crime, guilt, and - not to forget - free will and individual responsibility.  

:"Criminology needs to rid itself of those theories of punishment which assume there are universal qualities in forms of punishment or assume a straightforward connection between crime and punishment. Given the perseverance of this conventional notion of 'punishment' as essentially a 'good' against an 'evil', any effort at changing common-sense notions of 'crime' and 'crime control' requires a reconceptualization of both concepts: 'crime' and 'punishment'."