What Punishment Expresses
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918764794 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
What Punishment Expresses
Craig Reeves
Birkbeck University of London, UK
Abstract
In this article, I consider the questionof what punishment expresses and propose a way of
approachingthe question that overcomes problemsin both psychosocial and philosophical
expressivisttraditions. The problem in bothtraditions is, I suggest, the need for an adequate
moral – neither moralizing nor reductive – psychology, and I argue that Melanie Klein’s
work offers such a moral psychology.I offer a reconstruction of Klein’s central claims and
begin to sketchsome of its potential implicationsfor an expressive account ofpunishment. I
outline a Kleinian interpretation of modern punishment’s expression as of an essentially
persecutory naturebut also include depressive realizationsthat have generally proved too
difficult for liberal modernity to work through successfully, and the recent ‘persecutory
turn’is a defence against such realizations.I conclude by considering the widerphilosophical
significance of a Kleinian account for the expressivist theory of punishment.
Keywords
Expression, Melanie Klein, philosophy of punishment, psychoanalysis, psychosocial penal
theory
It is much easier to show that punishment has a symbolic significance than to say exactly
what it is that punishment expresses .... (Feinberg, 1965: 402)
Expressivism – Philosophical and Psychosocial
The view that punishment should be understood as an essentially expressive practice and
evaluated as such has been influential in both the philosophy of punishment and psy-
chosocial penal theory,
1
though about this view, as about many issues, there has been
Corresponding author:
Craig Reeves, Birkbeck University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Email: c.reeves@bbk.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(1) 31–57
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918764794
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relatively little communication between these two traditions. Philosophical and psycho-
social expressivist accounts of punishment have developed more or less independently,
as if they had little to do with one another. This is a pity because expressivism is a
promising conceptual account of punishment that could, if cashed out systematically in
line with a realistic moral psychology, allow us to deepen our critical understanding of
punishment in liberal modernity.
The crucial question for expressivist accounts is what it is that punishment expresses,
and philosophical and psychosocial accounts tend to offer very different answers to this
question. Philosophical accounts typically tell a moralized story: punishment expresses
deserved or warranted (in the good case, at least) ‘moral condemnation’ or ‘censure’ and
the moral emotions – resentment, disapprobation, outrage – that properly accompany it
(Duff, 1986; Feinberg, 1965; Hampton, 1992; Murphy and Hampton, 1988). To psycho-
social theory, this will seem superficial. It focuses on what our practices of punishment
say they express, what they avow, and on their manifest rather than their latent expres-
sive content (see Freud, 1953). And this, psychosocial theory may say, is to operate with
a naive conception of expression that conflates symbolic expression with mere significa-
tion. One consequence of this is that philosophical accounts can struggle to say anything
about the expressive significance of concrete punishment itself – that is, of (i) hard
treatment and (ii) its various concrete socio-historical forms. These are typically under-
stood as simply arbitrary conventional signs of censure – merely ‘our particular symbols
of infamy’ (Feinberg, 1965: 421) – conceived in a voluntaristic or decisionistic way: we
have simply chosen these conventional ‘symbols’ and could choose others (see Hamp-
ton, 1992, and a critique of Hampton’s position in Gert et al., 2004). Hence, conven-
tionalist expressivism shines little light on the centrality of hard treatment in penality
generally, let alone on the specific expressive meanings of the ‘painful symbolic machin-
ery’ (Feinberg, 1965: 420) that we happen to have in fact developed.
Now this naive conception of expression must, psychosocial theory may say, pre-
suppose an unrealistic moral psychology – a moralizing psychology, which simply
builds the psychology out of the moral categories rather than offering a genuinely
psychological account of them. Psychosocial accounts offer deep interpretation of the
latent content expressed in punishment that do not simply accept uncritically the man-
ifest moral story of retributive penality, that punishment expresses deserved condemna-
tion in response to wrongdoing, but try to be sensitive to the underlying dynamics at
work. They find such items as solidarity (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]), aggression, fear and
guilt and their distortion, rationalization or disavowal (Mead, 1964 [1918]; Nietzsche,
1998 [1887]) as the real, deeper, latent expressive content of punishment.
Recent psychosocial work in this area has been promising (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007;
Garland, 1990; Maruna et al., 2004) but as yet remains rather less than fully developed
and systematic. Selective in their interpretive use of disparate psychoanalytic concepts of
unconscious drives, emotions and defences, they feel ad hoc and eclectic. But we should
want to be able to make sense both of the unities that are found in constellations of
expressed materials and of the antinomies that exist between different such constella-
tions. We should want to know why and how the constellations of specific emotional and
defensive elements in punishment hang together in the ways they do, and why others
cannot coexist stably, always leading to dissonance and oscillation.
32 Social & Legal Studies 28(1)
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