5.2 Sociology of Punishment

Punishment is not only a legal act but a social institution — its forms track society's structures. Durkheim: punishment's real function is the reaffirmation of the collective conscience — the denunciation ritual that binds the law-abiding (the expressive face). Foucault: the spectacle of the scaffold (punishment on the body) gave way to discipline and surveillance (punishment through the soul — the prison, the timetable, the norm) — penality's history as power's history. Garland: the late-modern turn — welfare corrections' decline and the "culture of control" (mass imprisonment, the risk society's preventive state). The sociology's exam lesson: ask of anypunishment not only "is it deserved?" but "what social work does it do?" — for Nepal: the shift from Muluki Ain's caste-graded, corporal penality to the 2074 codes' equal, corrective penality is society's own history written in penal form.