Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

This is a study in industrial sociology; it a partial report, to be followed by another, of an investigation of singel factory seen in the light of Max Weber's theory of bureacracy.

Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy.

Michel Foucault takes the reader on a serendipitous journey in tracing the history of madness from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Utilizing original documents, the author recreates the mood, the place, and the proper perspective in the history of madness. Madness or folly is viewed as part of the human condition and to be examined and illuminated through one of its many facets. At the end of the Middle Ages madness was seen either as a tragic or comic phenomenon. The Renaissance, with Erasmus' Praise of Folly , demonstrated how imagination and its derivatives were to thinkers of that day. The French Revolution introduced the so-called medical approach. Madness is a ubiquitous phenomenon that has common roots not only in medicine but in poetry and tragedy. Shakespeare brilliantly describes psychological phenomena with even greater clarity than Tuke or Wills. The author weaves a fascinating history showing the changing pattern of

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

The Concept Of Law

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation’s emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison’s historical roots persuasively explain the prison’s "birth" in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo-institutional account of the prison’s diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field-level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison’s innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto-prisons, while its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudo-professional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and the varied reasons behind their diffusion.

A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's "birth" in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo-institutional account of the prison's diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field-level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison's innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto-prisons, and its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, which was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudo-professional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and those that advance their diffusion.The diffusion of legal institutions, policies, and techniques has tremendous consequences for the interaction between law and society. New technologies' diffusion can potentially revolutionize legal practice, general assumptions, and material outcomes. These consequences have followed many innovations, including alternative dispute resolution (Edelman and Suchman 1999), rights talk (Milner 1989), problem-centered courts (Nolan 2001), and "mega" law firms (Galanter 1983). Significantly, it is these innovations' diffusion across organizations and states, not just their emergence that increases their ability to affect legal processes and outcomes. Understanding how legal innovations diffuse is, thus, necessary to understand law's impact on society.Unfortunately, scholars rarely investigate the mechanisms that spread criminal justice innovations (Grattet, Jenness, and Curry 1998). Studies of penal change have primarily analyzed innovations or their widespread consequences. Thus, to understand the popularity of three strikes laws (Zimring, Kamin, Hawkins 2001), supermaximum-security prisons (Reiter 2012), or "sunbelt justice" (the strange mixture of racially tinged punitiveness and a cost-conscious small-government ethos) (Lynch 2010), scholars study the first instance or the most copied examples. While this approach is vital, similarly enthusiastic examinations of diffusion are necessary to better understand change.Instead, scholars treat diffusion as a natural consequence of innovation. They implicitly posit that whatever zeitgeist caused the innovation was present elsewhere, albeit less intensely. Alternatively, scholars argue widespread belief in innovations' efficacy at reducing crime, or generating political capital, explain jurisdictions' adoption. Indeed, scholars have amply illustrated the political utility of adopting tough-on-crime policies (Beckett 1997; Campbell and Schoenfeld 2013; Gottschalk 2006; Simon 2007). However, this approach overlooks the mechanisms by which innovations spread and understates the contingent nature of diffusion. An emphasis on diffusion would interrogate the factors motivating different jurisdictions' adoption of new practices.Several exceptional studies have examined the diffusion rather than emergence of criminal law technologies. Studies of community-based policing (Crank 1994), COMPSTAT (Willis, Mastrofski, and Weisburd 2007), and hate crime definitions (Grattet and Jenness 2005) have carefully reconstructed police departments' decision-making processes, highlighting the mechanisms carrying innovations to subsequent adopters. …

Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain prisoner behaviors, creating both analytical and normative consequences. Instead, I suggest the concept of “friction” more accurately describes the reactive behaviors that occur when people find themselves in highly controlled environments.

Resistance or friction: Understanding the significance of prisoners’ secondary adjustments:

Recently, scholars have increasingly criticized descriptions of significant penal change as "ruptures"--- sudden breaks with past practices, often replacing old technologies with new. This article promotes an alternative understanding of penal change as the layering of new penal technologies over old technologies to describe the complicated coexistence of old and new penal technologies following significant moments of change. This study demonstrates the layering process through a case study of the first major American penal reform: proto-prisons adopted between 1785 and 1822 are often described as the first great rupture in which long-term incarceration replaced capital punishment. Using the relationship between America's emerging proto-prisons and declining death penalty, this article illustrates the complicated coexistence of penal reforms with older technologies. While proto-prisons emerged out of revulsion with capital punishment, many states adopted proto-prisons independently of their decisions to reduce capital offenses and most states retained relatively robust death penalties. Rather than a replacement or rupture, the emergence of proto-prisons represented an additional layer of punishment that partially displaced older technologies.

Ashley T. Rubin

Papers

A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion

A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion

Resistance or friction: Understanding the significance of prisoners’ secondary adjustments:

Penal Change as Penal Layering: A Case Study of Proto-Prison Adoption and Capital Punishment Reduction, 1785-1822

Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour