Durkheim on Punishment — The Expressive Function

The sociological study of punishment begins with a question that the legal and penological traditions tended not to ask directly: what does punishment do at the level of society, beyond what it does to the person punished? Durkheim, in The Division of Labor in Society (1893, Book I, Chapter 2), proposed an answer that still organizes the field. Punishment, he argued, is not primarily an instrument for reducing crime or correcting offenders. It is a ritual response to rule violation whose principal social function is the reinforcement of the shared moral beliefs — the ‘collective conscience’ — on which social solidarity depends. The criminal act is defined, for Durkheim, precisely by its capacity to provoke this collective response; crime is ‘an act that offends strong and defined states of the collective conscience’ (Durkheim 1893, p. 39, 1984 trans.).

Several implications follow. First, the severity and form of punishment are explained less by the instrumental problem of controlling the offender than by the symbolic work of reaffirming the violated norm. Public executions, expulsions from the community, and degradation rituals signal the seriousness of the norm; their audience is the conforming majority, not the offender. Second, the target of punishment is the offence as a violation of shared values; the offender’s individual characteristics matter chiefly insofar as they make the act legible as a transgression. Third, Durkheim expected the character of punishment to shift historically as the moral basis of solidarity shifts — from the repressive sanctions characteristic of mechanical solidarity in simple societies to the restitutive and differentiated sanctions characteristic of the organic solidarity of complex industrial societies (Durkheim 1893, pp. 68-85).

The later sociological literature on punishment has treated the expressive function as one register among several, rather than the complete account. Punishment is also instrumental — it incapacitates offenders, signals deterrent thresholds, allocates state coercive capacity. It is also political and economic — it distributes who is subject to state violence, at what scale, and in whose interest. The sophistication of contemporary sociology of punishment consists in holding these registers together without reducing one to another.

Garland’s Punishment and Modern Society (1990) is the canonical synthesis. Garland reads Durkheim as supplying the expressive register (punishment as moral reaffirmation), Weber as supplying the rationalization register (punishment as bureaucratic administration and the monopoly of legitimate violence), Marx as supplying the political-economic register (punishment as class discipline and labor regulation — the tradition extended by Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939 on punishment and labor markets), and Foucault as supplying the power-knowledge register (punishment as a technique of modern power). The argument is that no single register exhausts punishment; each illuminates different features (Garland 1990, pp. 3-12).

For the purposes of this topic, the Durkheimian starting point does two kinds of work. It disciplines the naive instrumentalism that still dominates public debate about crime — the assumption that punishment policy is to be evaluated solely by its effect on crime rates. And it supplies a framework for understanding why punishment systems can be remarkably insensitive to their own instrumental failures: the ritual function persists even when the deterrent function is empirically weak. One need not accept Durkheim’s functionalism wholesale to use the observation analytically. The US incarceration boom, examined in later sections of this topic, is a case where punishment expanded dramatically during a period in which its marginal deterrent and incapacitative returns were, on most available estimates, modest — a pattern that the instrumental register alone cannot explain (Travis, Western, and Redburn 2014, Chapter 5).

The chapter’s remaining sections proceed from Durkheim to Foucault’s account of the historical shift to disciplinary institutions, then to the empirical record of American incarceration, its racial structure, the sociology of policing, and finally the comparative and normative terrain on which alternatives are assessed.