Introduction
Punishment can be defined as an action taken based on a person’s undesired behavior. It is intended to prevent future occurrence of the unwanted behavior by changing how the person behaves. It is a social mechanism used to help ensure the balanced functioning of a family, group, organization, or a society.
There are two main elements to punishment. First, appropriate behavior is arbitrary; it is determined by communal agreement regarding right and wrong behavior. Punishment attempts to foster and ensure what the group has determined to be appropriate, moral behavior. Second, punishment symbolizes power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that punishment should be understood as an expression of power because, without the power to punish a person behaving in an undesirable manner, chaos could occur.
When a member of any social unit, small or large, goes against the group’s accepted norms, it disrupts the unit. To regain balance or homeostasis, action may be needed, and a member of the social unit may punish the wrongdoer. Punishment may take the form of making some kind of amends. This could range from a token act to exile (temporary or permanent) or even to death.
A Brief History
One of the earliest records of punishments levied by a society can be found in a legal code developed in Babylon in about 2000 BCE, during the reign of Hammurabi, which listed corrective measures for wrongdoing. The Mosaic law recorded in the Pentateuch of the Old Testament is another early set of codes. Near the end of the first century CE, corporal punishment was increasingly applied to slaves and lower-class citizens, while punishments for higher-class citizens generally took the form of compensation.
During the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian in the sixth century, an attempt was made to match the severity of punishment to the level of the offense. More than a century later, laws became increasingly localized, although they generally followed the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church. Many of these laws were centralized during the reign of Charlemagne.
When William the Conqueror became king of England following the Norman invasion, he centralized power around himself as monarch. Any wrongdoing therefore became a crime against the king. He established the process of trial by ordeal to address those who violated the law, who were known as enemies of the king. Much of the punishment, official and unofficial, was directed at the offenders’ bodies, through forms of torture.
It was not until the age of reason that major changes began to occur. With the development of social contracts, crimes were considered to have been committed against society, and people began to be viewed as rational beings able to make rational choices. It was during this period that the classical school offered new foundations of punishment as represented in the writings of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. These scholars believed that a person had free will and could make a rational choice whether to commit an offense. People made their choices by weighing the pleasure of the action against the punishment for it. Therefore, the punishment should fit the crime; be proportionate to the violation; be uniform and equal; be certain, swift, and severe; and deter and prevent.
Over the centuries, scholars have continued to debate what is effective punishment. For if punishment does not bring about the desired changes, then it does not serve its purpose.
Philosophies of Punishment
Most punishments are designed to prevent wrongdoers from repeating their acts and to deter people from committing undesired acts. There are four main philosophies of punishment. They are retribution (just deserts), deterrence, rehabilitation, and control (incapacitation).
Retribution has often been linked to revenge, taking an eye for an eye. Under this philosophy of punishment, justice is served if the punishment is equivalent to the wrongdoing: offenders get what they deserve (their just deserts). This has been the basis of much legal code.
As a philosophy of punishment, deterrence attempts to either restrict certain behaviors or encourage people to avoid them. Punishments aimed at deterring crime are designed to cause people to lose as much or more from committing an undesired behavior as they stand to gain from the behavior. Such punishments should cause a person to chose not to engage in the undesired behavior. However, punishment should not be excessive, as this might have negative overall results.
Rehabilitation seeks to change the offender so the person will not repeat the act. Under this philosophy, it is believed that the offender suffers from some sort of needs or deficiencies, and these deficiencies need to be addressed for the individual to change. Punishment should be individualized to address the offender’s needs and deficiencies.
Control is based on the rationale that if the offender is incapacitated, the person cannot repeat the unacceptable behavior. Although establishing control over an offender does not keep the individual from desiring to commit an undesirable act, it effectively contains the person and prevents the individual from acting inappropriately. Control may take the form of restricting the person’s movement or simply supervising the person.
Moral Development
An important consideration of punishment is whether the offender knows right from wrong. The process of learning what society has deemed right and wrong requires the moral development of the individual. This learning process is described differently by various psychological schools.
The psychoanalytic school describes this as a child learning to act in a manner in which the child will experience positive feelings and avoid negative feelings. Sigmund Freud focused on the development of the child’s personality during the learning process, whereas Erik H. Erikson examined how children internalize the teachings of both parents to win and keep their love.
The cognitive school is represented by the theorists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Piaget presented his theory that as children develop, they gain respect for rules and justice. The development process begins in a premoral period, a period in which children have little awareness of rules but simply act in a way that gives them pleasure. Then at about school age, children begin to develop an awareness of rules that they regard as absolute. They believe that either an act is right or wrong; they also believe in imminent justice, or that any wrong act will be punished in some way.
In the final stage in Piaget’s process of cognitive development, children begin to surrender the absoluteness of rules for a more relative understanding of the nature of rules. This change comes from an awareness that rules are arbitrary social agreements and on occasion can be challenged, as rules should serve human needs. As a result, rules can be violated to serve the needs of a person. After experiencing and seeing others violate rules and go unpunished, children begin to accept the idea of reciprocal punishment, which is a more rehabilitative form of punishment.
Kohlberg developed on Piaget’s theory by extending the development process. He created a three-level development process in which each level had two stages. This development process was unidirectional. Once a person has moved to a higher level of development, the individual could not regress to a lower level.
Kohlberg’s first level was preconventional morality. At this level, a child follows rules to avoid punishment and to receive rewards. The punishment determines how bad an act is: The more severe the punishment, the worse the wrong. A child conforms to rules to seek rewards and self-satisfaction.
In conventional morality, a child seeks approval of others and tries to avoid shame. A child begins to experience understanding of others (empathy) and to conform to rules out of a desire to cooperate with others.
In postconventional morality, the third level, the child’s moral reasoning is based on a broader understanding of justice and right and wrong. Sometimes the child’s understanding of right and wrong is in conflict with the established rules and therefore justifies challenging rules. In the second stage within the third level, universal justice, the child is able to transcend any conflict through an ideal reasoning process.
Learning
Behaviorists and cognitivists have applied principles of reinforcement and punishment to change behavior. Both reinforcement and punishment can be positive or negative and are used to condition a person to act within the range of acceptable or desired behavior.
Reinforcement is a reward people receive for performing the desired or appropriate behavior. It is intended to increase the possibility of people’s adopting the behavior. A positive reward is receiving something the person wants and a negative reward is having something removed that the person does not want. In identifying appropriate reinforcers, an individual’s personal economy—the value a person places on an item or an action—must be determined. Individualizing reinforcers makes them more effective in accomplishing the goal of change.
Punishment is used to prevent or change undesired behavior and to decrease the possibility of it recurring. A positive punishment is the gaining of something unwanted, and a negative punishment is the loss of something wanted. Either punishment is undesirable for the recipient.
A major difference between behavorists, such as B. F. Skinner, and cognitivists, such as Albert Bandura, is the cognitive factor of learning. Skinner did not accept that humans have free will but believed that their actions are environmentally determined. Bandura argued the value of observation and modeling. He proposed that a person could learn by observing the rewards and punishments another person received for behavior. Some studies, including that by Robert E. Larzelere and his associates, have suggested that a more effective disciplinary response can be produced by combining reasoning and punishment rather than using reasoning alone.
Bibliography
Castro, Nicolas. Psychology of Punishment: New Research. Hauppage: Nova, 2013. Digital file.
Cusac, Anne-Marie. Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. Print.
Horne, Christine. The Rewards of Punishment: A Relational Theory of Norm Enforcement. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print.
Larzelere, Robert E., et al. “Punishment Enhances Reasoning’s Effectiveness as a Disciplinary Response to Toddlers.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60 (1998): 388–430. Print.
Miltenberger, Raymond G. Behavior Modification: Principles and Procedures. 5th ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2012. Print.
Molm, Linda D. “Is Punishment Effective: Coercive Strategies in Social Exchange.” Social Psychology Quarterly 57.2 (1994): 75–94. Print.
Oswald, Margit E., Steffen Bieneck, and Jorg Hupfeld-Heinemann, eds. Social Psychology of Punishment of Crime. Malden: Wiley, 2009. Print.
Russo, Jennifer P., and Nicholas M. Palmetti. Psychology of Punishment. New York: Nova, 2011. Digital file.
Sparks, Richard, and Jonathan Simon. The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2013. Digital file.
No comments:
Post a Comment