SOC371H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Numbers Game, Civil Society, Metonymy
Document Summary
Garland: the culture of control: a history of the present. The reappearance in official penal policy of punitive sentiments and expressive gestures that appear archaic and old fashioned tend to confound to the standard social theories of punishment and its historical development. Many developments have been made in penal policy that it is hard to determine where we should draw the line for what is acceptable and what isn"t: eg. Victim impact statements, electric monitoring, community notification laws, etc. There is a lack of any stable ideology to guide the actions of penal policy. At the start of the 20th century, after many years of uncertainty, new principles are becoming established and new working assumptions are slowly coming into focus. Today"s reconfigured field of criminal control is the result of political choices and administrative decisions but these choices and decisions are grounded in a new structure of social relations and coloured by a new pattern of cultural sensibilities.
