Looking at the nature of punishment

Looking at the nature of punishment, the most influential sociological analysis has been that showing the transition from penalties inflicted on the body (execution, torture and mutilation, as well as less drastic physical punishments such as the stocks) to those directed at the mind and the char¬acter (labour and penance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prisons, education and therapy in twentieth-century prisons), punishments which are designed to produce not the physically incapacitated citizen but the right-thinking citizen (Foucault 1977). Sociologists have also demon¬strated the social organization that takes place inside prisons - the inmate groupings, the power relationships that develop - providing a sociology of prisons alongside the more abstract and theoretical sociology of imprison¬ment and punishment more generally (e.g. Goffman 1961). That the defin¬ing characteristic of modern punishments is their disciplinary nature, and that the most predictable effect of imprisonment on offenders is institutionalization, are important ideas developed in these sociologies, important ideas which have been incorporated into much subsequent sociological-penological thinking.