The police and punishment: Understanding the pains of policing

AuthorDiarmaid M Harkin
Published date01 February 2015
Date01 February 2015
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1362480614543043
Subject MatterArticles
Theoretical Criminology
2015, Vol. 19(1) 43 –58
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480614543043
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The police and punishment:
Understanding the pains of
policing
Diarmaid M Harkin
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Abstract
This article argues that police studies should draw on the sociology of punishment to
better understand state pain-delivery. Whereas penal theorists commonly assess the
pain and punishment of inmates in relation to wider social sentiments, police theory has
yet to regard police violence and harm in the same fashion. As a result, police scholars
often fail to address why the damage caused by public constabularies, even when widely
publicized, is accommodated and accepted. Adapting the idea of ‘punitiveness’ from
penal theory allows some explanation of how the public views injury and suffering
caused by the police by illuminating the emotions and sentiments their actions generate.
Keywords
Penal sensibilities, police violence, policing, punishment, punitiveness
Introduction
Over a decade ago, in the context of largely stable, long-term support for the police in
England and Wales, Loader and Mulcahy (2003: 35, emphases in original) asked:
So why—in the face of corruption scandals, miscarriages of justice, paramilitarization, falling
crime detection rates, the decline of visible patrols, the Stephen Lawrence affair, and so on—
does confidence in the police remain in certain quarters so high? Surely this question should
also form part of the sociology of policing’s explanatory agenda?
Corresponding author:
Diarmaid M Harkin, University of Edinburgh, School of Law, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, Scotland, UK.
Email: d.harkin@sms.ed.ac.uk
543043TCR0010.1177/1362480614543043Theoretical CriminologyHarkin
research-article2014
Article
44 Theoretical Criminology 19(1)
Taking up this question, this article turns to the sociology of punishment to suggest that
the injury and suffering delivered by public constabularies ought to be explored in rela-
tion to ‘punitiveness’. Whereas penal theorists often connect popular sentiments, or
‘penal sensibilities’ to the pain delivered upon inmates by prisons (Garland, 1990a),
police scholars have not yet considered the harm and injury done by public constabular-
ies in the same regard. Yet, police pain-delivery, like punishment, is also entrenched in
the ‘collective conscious’. Thus, just as David Garland (1990b: 4) suggests that punish-
ment is a ‘realm for the expression of social value and emotion’ that is ‘deeply rooted in
emotional needs and desires’ (1990b: 11), a similar case should be made for policing.
Taking this perspective raises a number of questions. What, for example, can be learnt
from penal theory in how the pain delivered by the police is generated and conditioned
by public sensibilities? As the public becomes more punitive (Pratt, 2007), are they more
supportive of and less alarmed by police violence? Do societies with a more ‘punitive’
prison system have a correspondingly harsher police? Would a punitive public, intolerant
of criminality or disorder, be more forgiving and understanding of the police delivering
hurt and injury?
If, like the prison, policing is considered a realm for the expression of emotion, police
pain-delivery must also be conditioned by popular sentiment and sensibilities. To be
sure, public evaluation of the police is often bound up with larger political and psycho-
logical factors (Bradford et al., 2013). Support for the police is often founded in ideol-
ogy, a belief in the necessity of public constabularies, and potential ignorance or
misinformation about police behaviour. The role of these factors will be explored towards
the end of this article, but first, it turns to the penal theorists who argue that punishment
is a function of popular emotion.
Punishment as a ‘function’ of popular emotion
Sociologists of punishment have long asserted that the practices of courts and prisons are
shaped by, reflect and reinforce popular emotion. ‘In the first place,’ Emile Durkheim
(1984 [1893]: 44) famously asserted, ‘punishment constitutes an emotional reaction’. One
hundred years later, Garland (1990a) revisited this idea in his notion of ‘penal sensibili-
ties’, via Norbert Elias’s (1978 [1939]) work on a ‘civilizing process’. Around the same
time, writing in Holland, Pieter Spierenberg (1984) explained the end to capital punish-
ment in similar terms. In all these texts, popular attitudes, tastes and proclivities change
over time, and in so doing, transform views and expectations of punishment. As cultural
beliefs about violence, manners, ideas, tastes and humanitarian standards shift, brutality is
outlawed, punishment is monopolized by the state, criminal justice becomes bureaucra-
tized and the ‘spectacle of punishment’ disappears behind dull, inscrutable prison walls.
Others, less interested in the distant past, also connect official practices with popular
sentiment. Thus, many explained the startling rise in imprisonment from the 1970s
among most developed nations as a result of rising ‘punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995; Pratt,
2007; Pratt et al., 2005). Garland (2001) places such developments within a ‘Culture of
Control’, while Loïc Wacquant (2009) frames it as a consequence of ascendant neoliber-
alism. The question around the ‘punitive turn’ is, as David Nelken (2010: 332) observes,
a ‘crowded one’.

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