Punishment in America: Innovation, Continuity, Recycling, and Technological Transformations

This chapter examines the historical transformations and contemporary uses of three groups of punishments: non-custodial sanctions, imprisonment, and the death penalty. It begins with a contemporary overview of mass incarceration but crosses different centuries and regions to argue that punishment in the United States is a complex repertoire of innovation, continuity, recycling, and technological transformation. It highlights the competing aims of criminal punishment: deterrence, shaming, maintaining community cohesion and removing disruptors, effecting individual reform, repentance, or rehabilitation, and protecting the public, as well as revenge, repression, and incapacitation. It notes the many contextual factors that explain the prominence of specific aims in a particular time-period: the passage of new laws or legal repeals, conquest, locality, region, religion, labor needs, race, class, gender, attitudes toward sex, immigration, nativism, xenophobia, specific group profiling or targeting, political rhetoric, policymaking, and war. It acknowledges key twentieth-century themes such as greater reliance on social science expertise, the federalization of sentencing standards, standardization of punishment methods and prison regimes, and greater intervention by appellate courts and the United States' Supreme Court in internal prison governance and matters of human and civil rights, in contrast to a pre-1960s judicial “hands-off” stance.