Punishment and Social Organization: A Study of Durkheim's Theory of Penal Evolution

Abstract

For Émile Durkheim, crime and punishment were integral features of organized social life. He considered the study of crime and punishment essential to the sociological enterprise precisely because these “social facts” revealed the inner workings of society and the mechanism through which societies change. In The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim argues (1938:70) that “crime is … necessary, it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life,” and that “it is no longer possible … to dispute the fact that law and morality vary from one social type to the next, nor that they change within the same type if the conditions of life are modified.” Because he viewed law as a reflection of basic social arrangements, Durkheim grounded his theory of social change in an analysis of comparative legal types. He assumed (1933:68) that “since law reproduces the principal forms of social solidarity, we have only to classify the different types of law to find therefrom the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it.” In his central theoretical work, The Division of Labor in Society (1933), Durkheim linked the changing nature of legal controls (repressive to restitutive) to transformations in the nature of social solidarity (mechanical to organic).

IUS bituminous:Solidarity and legal order in a dangerous work environment

“…He expected groups united by organic solidarity to be characterized by more formal restitutive components. It is uncertain as to how this shift from repression to restitution is to be empirically documented (Schwartz and Miller, 1964;Spitzer, 1975). Indeed, evidence from archaic societies does not support Durkheim's notions about the relative absence of restitution.…”

“…One important implication of the existence of a hierarchy of levels is that legal behavior is formalized as groups are unable to resolve trouble cases, due to the individual's ability to play one group against another (Durkheim, 1964). This evolution of law has been a persistent concern of scholars ( Durkheim, 1964Durkheim, , 1973Maine, 1970;Spitzer, 1975;Black, 1976;Jones, 1981). As groups increase interaction across boundaries, and in the process become more complex entities, procedures develop that transcend and dominate individual groups.…”

The sociology of law in the United States

“…There have appeared in American sociology a number of empirical tests of ideas of the classic theorists that lend themselves to such assessment. The work of Durkheim, in particular--the most clearly amenable to empirical testing--has inspired a number of well-known research studies, exploiting such methods as cross-cultural research, historical research, and survey research (see, e.g., Schwartz and Miller, 1964;Erikson, 1966;Spitzer, 1975;Lanza-Kaduce, Krohn, Radosevich, and Akers, 1979). Some of these studies have confirmed Durkheimian hypotheses; some have not.…”

Bureaucracy, “domesticated” elites, and the abolition of capital punishment. Processes of state-formation and the number of executions in England and Habsburg Austria between 1700 and 1914

“…Other theoretical perspectives are more concerned with processes of power formation and their correlation to the regime of punishment; Savelsberg (1999) focuses on the organization of domination and knowledge, while Durkheim stresses the importance of the evolution of institutions and its relationship to the collective conscience (Durkheim 1899/1900: 65-77, Durkheim 1984, Spitzer 1975). Durkheim suggests studying changes in the regime of punishments within a process of democratization in which the degree of brutality of punishment decreases.…”