Shame punishment has existed for perhaps as long as people have been punished, and the issue has been revisited in recent years to help improve crime reduction efforts. In this collection, shame punishment is examined from various critical perspectives, including its relation with expressivism, the diversity of shame punishment used today, the link between shame punishment and restorative justice, the relationship between dignity and shame punishment, shame punishment and its use for sex offenders, and critics of shame punishment in its different incarnations. The selected essays are from leading experts and represent the most important contributions to scholarly research in the field.
Now a New York Times bestseller and from the author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame. 'It's about the terror, isn't it?' 'The terror of what?' I said. 'The terror of being found out.' For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job. A great renaissance of public shaming is sweeping our land. Justice has been democratized. The silent majority are getting a voice. But what are we doing with our voice? We are mercilessly finding people's faults. We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it. We are using shame as a form of social control. Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You've Been Publicly Shamed is a deeply honest book about modern life, full of eye-opening truths about the escalating war on human flaws - and the very scary part we all play in it.
Punishment is the imposition, by a legitimate authority, of a painful consequence upon one who has offended the social order by indulging in acts contrary to the social good. Punishment is understood to serve a primary objective in any society: it rehabilitates or reforms (re-forms or shapes anew) the psyches of social offenders to bring them in line with prevailing codes of behavior. Punishment thus is a highly conservative force, affirming simultaneously the codes of conduct deemed desirable within the society and the status quo of power relations that hold sway in the society. Punishment is a form of social teaching. One of the favorite forms of didactic pain to which legitimate authorities turn, in teaching conformity to social regulations, is the psychological pain of shame. Shame is a special favorite in the penology of societies of the Western world, whose governing logic is already grounded in the shame-based religions of Judaism and Christianity. Parents, school teachers, religious leaders, and state authorities readily employ shame as an effective method for teaching social lessons. Shame is a powerful force that reaches deep into the psyche of the offender and gnaws away at her sense of self-worth and identity, with longstanding and devastating existential effects. Shame has profound and enduring effects, because it has the capacity to transform an empirical fact (of having done something unacceptable) into an ontological reality (of being unacceptable as a human being). Shame dehumanizes. Shame is a powerfully effective tool for altering behavior, but because shame dehumanizes, it often fails to have the effect that the punisher is seeking to bring about. Shame sickens souls, rather than cures them. It sickens them to such a degree that shame more often acts as a promoter of criminality than as a teacher of the social good.
An urgent, illuminating exploration of the social nature of shame and of how it might be used to promote large-scale political change and social reform. “[Jacquet] exposes the ways shame plays into collective ideas of punishment and reward, and the social mechanisms that dictate the ways we dictate our behavior.” —The Boston Globe Examining how we can retrofit the art of shaming for the age of social media, Jennifer Jacquet shows that we can challenge corporations and even governments to change policies and behaviors that are detrimental to the environment. Urgent and illuminating, Is Shame Necessary? offers an entirely new understanding of how shame, when applied in the right way and at the right time, has the capacity to keep us from failing our planet and, ultimately, from failing ourselves.
Crime, Shame and Reintegration is a contribution to general criminological theory. Its approach is as relevant to professional burglary as to episodic delinquency or white collar crime. Braithwaite argues that some societies have higher crime rates than others because of their different processes of shaming wrongdoing. Shaming can be counterproductive, making crime problems worse. But when shaming is done within a cultural context of respect for the offender, it can be an extraordinarily powerful, efficient and just form of social control. Braithwaite identifies the social conditions for such successful shaming. If his theory is right, radically different criminal justice policies are needed - a shift away from punitive social control toward greater emphasis on moralizing social control. This book will be of interest not only to criminologists and sociologists, but to those in law, public administration and politics who are concerned with social policy and social issues.
Punishment is a topic of increasing importance for citizens and policymakers. Why should we punish criminals? Which theory of punishment is most compelling? Is the death penalty ever justified? These questions and many more are examined in this highly engaging and accessible guide. Punishment is a critical introduction to the philosophy of punishment, offering a new and refreshing approach that will benefit readers of all backgrounds and interests. The first comprehensive critical guide to examine all leading contemporary theories of punishments, this book explores – among others – retribution, the communicative theory of punishment, restorative justice and the unified theory of punishment. Thom Brooks applies these theories to several case studies in detail, including capital punishment, juvenile offending and domestic violence. Punishment highlights the problems and prospects of different approaches in order to argue for a more pluralistic and compelling perspective that is novel and ground-breaking. This second edition has extensive revisions and updates to all chapters, including an all-new chapter on the unified theory substantively redrafted and new chapters on cyber-crimes and social media as well as corporate crimes. Punishment is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, criminal justice, criminology, justice studies, law, political science and sociology.
Compliance has become key to our contemporary markets, societies, and modes of governance across a variety of public and private domains. While this has stimulated a rich body of empirical and practical expertise on compliance, thus far, there has been no comprehensive understanding of what compliance is or how it influences various fields and sectors. The academic knowledge of compliance has remained siloed along different disciplinary domains, regulatory and legal spheres, and mechanisms and interventions. This handbook bridges these divides to provide the first one-stop overview of what compliance is, how we can best study it, and the core mechanisms that shape it. Written by leading experts, chapters offer perspectives from across law, regulatory studies, management science, criminology, economics, sociology, and psychology. This volume is the definitive and comprehensive account of compliance.
This volume reports on the growing body of knowledge on shame and guilt, integrating findings from the authors' original research program with other data emerging from social, clinical, personality, and developmental psychology. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that these universally experienced affective phenomena have significant implications for many aspects of human functioning, with particular relevance for interpersonal relationships. --From publisher's description.
This groundbreaking book by an award-winning psychoanalyst and forensic psychiatrist presents a comprehensive exploration of a timely but often taboo topic: the failure of punishment to deter crime and violence, an issue that affects us both individually and as a culture. Written at the culmination of the author s fifty-year career as a psychoanalyst, forensic psychologist and scholar, this wide-ranging work identifies the origins of violence and investigates the surprising consequences of punishment from a multitude of perspectives. In his treatment of the topic, Dr. Dorpat utilizes scientific research; ethical reasoning, and his vast clinical experience and insight. He also suggests the benefits of new and emerging humane alternatives to the revenge/punishment model currently entrenched in our society, such as restorative justice. In contrast to most contemporary measures, these new approaches while still imprisoning dangerous individuals effectively stress reparation and forms of sanctioning other than incarceration. When restitution replaces revenge, everyone benefits. Crimes of Punishment examines four key, interrelated social methods of punishment. These are (1) the corporal punishment of children, (2) the incarceration of adults in prisons, (3) capital punishment the death penalty, and (4) emotional (verbal) abuse. As he elucidates and analyzes each of these forms of punishment, Dr. Dorpat clearly and logically makes the case that punishment is not only ineffectual but that it also engenders more of what it ostensibly aims to stop: violence and misbehavior. Both children and adults who are subjected to punishment tend to become more violent individuals. In covering the full scope of our contemporary justice system Dr. Dorpat brings to the forefront those who are often overlooked or dismissed: the victims of crime. His concluding chapters present and clarify the psychological wounds and needs of these individuals, and demonstrate how restorative justice is effective in attending to victims in an ethical and healing manner. In a humane and ethically evolved society restitution replaces punishment. Market Comparison-- Crimes of Punishment is unique in that it covers not just one but four different types of punishment (the corporal punishment of children, the incarceration of adults, the death penalty, and verbal emotional] abuse). Two earlier books written by psychiatrists expose the terrible conditions in America s prisons. They are The Crime of Punishment (New York: Viking, 1968) by Karl Menninger, and Prison Madness by Terry Kupers (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999). This book differs in two important ways from the books written by Menninger and Kupers. First, The Crimes of Punishment covers other kinds of punishment, while those authors deal only with the punishment of incarceration. Secondly, the reforms they recommend are merely piecemeal modifications of the present criminal justice systems, whereas Dr. Dorpat argues for a radical change that includes the abolition of today s punitive prison (Retributive Justice) system and the establishment of a new and different system, namely Restorative justice, a system that has been developed over the past decade in Australia and New Zealand. The Crimes of Punishment differs from Menninger s book in covering the many changes that have occurred in prisons since 1968. In several short chapters on restorative justice, the book also explores this exciting new approach and serves as an informed introduction to a new, important, and effective moral approach to the treatment of criminals.
This text examines the main trends in penal theorising over the past three decades. It asks what can justify criminal punishment and then explores the legitemacy of actual practices by examining what would count as adequate justification for them.