Sociology of Punishment

This course provides participants with guidance on sociological perspectives on punishment. Here, punishment (expressed through incarceration) is viewed as a complex social phenomenon tracing its role in society, the impact of which extends far beyond the population of offenders. The major theoretical approaches to penality derived from Emile Durkheim, Jeremy Bentham, Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault will be examined.