Punishment and Social Structure

rdf:langString Punishment and Social Structure

rdf:langString Punishment and Social Structure (1939), a book written by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, is the seminal Marxian analysis of punishment as a social institution. It represents the 'most sustained and comprehensive account of punishment to have emerged from within the Marxist tradition’ and ‘succeeds in opening up a whole vista of understanding which simply did not exist before it was written' (Garland 1990: 89, 110). It is a central text in radical criminology, and an influential work in criminological conflict theory, cited as a foundation text in several major textbooks (Oxford Handbook of Criminology 2007; Newburn 2007; Innes 2003). It offers a broader (macrosociological) level of analysis than many micro-analyses that focus on the atomized and differentiated individual (Jacobs 1977: 91). The work is extensively cited by both critical theorists and radical criminologists (Garland and Young 1983: 7, 24), and has influenced seminal works in the sociology of imprisonment, being cited in, for example, modern classics such as James B. Jacobs's Stateville (1977: 91), Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977:24) and Punishing the Poor (2009: 206) by Loïc Wacquant. The work represented a decisive step forward in the development of the criminological imagination regarding punishment, one that places it in significance 'alongside Durkheim's theory of punishment' (Garland 1990: 110). As such the work has been deployed extensively by eminent criminologists and sociologists as a critical lens to understand and explain contemporary phenomena such as mass imprisonment (Zimring and Hawkins 1993: 33), and there has been a significant revival of critical interest in the work. It is regarded as a 'classic', if frequently contested, text in the sociology of punishment, and criminology more generally (Melossi 1978: 79, 81).