“Discipline that hurts”: Punitive logics and governance in sport
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520925159 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Derek Silva,Liam Kennedy |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
“Discipline that hurts”:
Punitive logics and
governance in sport
Liam Kennedy and Derek Silva
King’s University College, Canada
Abstract
In this paper, we undertake a case study of the National Hockey League’s supplemen-
tary discipline regime to reflect on the ways in which discourses about social harm are
configured, taken up and used in the sporting landscape and how they reflect and reify
narrow understandings of crime and punishment. We find that the hockey world
employs predictable crime and justice metaphors when discussing on-ice violence
and suggest this breeds fear and legitimates governance strategies. The National
Hockey League’s supplemental discipline process itself—much like penality away from
the rink—is characterized by multiple, sometimes contradictory, objectives. Notably,
the league responsibilizes players, long endorsing or accepting vigilantism, refusing to
enact structural changes, and compelling players themselves to create a safe workplace.
This regime has contributed to financial struggles, chronic physical and mental health
issues, and the early deaths of a host of former players.
Keywords
discipline, governance, punitive logics, responsibilization, sport
In recent decades, scholars have documented the emergence of a host of punitive
practices—from carceral expansion in a variety of settings (e.g. Lamble, 2013;
Schept, 2015) and increased severity (Christie, 1996) to the rise of instrumental
reason and rational judgements at the expense of value-rational, humanizing
Corresponding author:
Derek Silva, King’s University College, 266 Epworth Avenue, London, ON, Canada N6A 2M3.
Email: dsilva28@uwo.ca
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(5) 658–680
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520925159
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judgement within our criminal justice systems (e.g. Feeley and Simon, 1992, 1994;
Hallsworth, 2000). The supposedly transformational shifts in penality those in the
West have witnessed and experienced are founded on neoliberal principles of gov-
ernance and proliferate throughout society, increasingly extending beyond court-
rooms and prisons (see Simon, 2007). These developments have been the basis of
considerable debate. Much less discussed are the genealogies, developments, fis-
sures, and contradictions in penal modernity that occur in areas of popular culture.
In this paper, we undertake a case study of the National Hockey League’s
(NHL) supplementary discipline regime—the internal network of individuals, pol-
icies, and practices wherein offenses are defined and penalties issued to players by
league officials for on-ice conduct—to explore how we understand, rationalize, and
justify punishment in professional sport. In short, this manuscript exposes the
ways in which the governing through crime model has become entrenched in pop-
ular culture, particularly in the sporting world, as well as some of its consequences
for athletic laborers. Specifically, our analysis reveals that NHL punishment mir-
rors what we observe in the criminal justice system in three important ways. First,
the league, players, fans, and news media employ crime and justice metaphors
when describing on-ice violence. Second, NHL supplemental discipline is complex
and contradictory; despite some emphasis on rehabilitation and repairing harm,
more antiquated notions of punishment based primarily on deterrence and inca-
pacitation remain the primary foci of punishment for hockey “offenders.” Third,
the NHL supplemental discipline regime responsibilizes players by refusing to
enact structural changes that would eliminate the possibility of serious injury,
enabling vigilantism by aggrieved players, and compelling players to create a
safe workplace. Notably, we argue that this regime—and the punitive logics under-
pinning it—has led to the temporary (and sometimes permanent) exclusion of
undisciplined bodies from the league and, in helping to foster unsafe working
conditions, has contributed to a host of troubling issues impacting the lives of
many former players.
Rethinking the punitive turn?
The sociology of punishment is rife with accounts of the shift to neoliberal penality
that regulates marginalized and racialized populations (e.g. Wacquant, 2009a,
2009b), rise of a “culture of control” (Garland, 2001), and emergence of a “new
punitiveness” (Pratt et al., 2005). Regardless of the terminology used, this schol-
arship has documented the significant growth in imprisonment rates, purported
move from prioritizing the rehabilitation of individual offenders to the manage-
ment of risky groups, and increasing prominence accorded to expressive punish-
ments designed to signal and release anger, frustration, and other emotions that
characterize U.S. penal policy over the last half century (e.g. Feeley and Simon,
1992; Pratt, 2000).
Along these lines, Simon (2007) argues that the problem of violent crime has
infested numerous elements of social life in recent decades and shaped the way
Kennedy and Silva 659
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