Essay

Punishment & Society

2019, Vol. 21(3) 267–274
Punishment and ! The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474518771317
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David Garland
New York University, USA

Abstract
First published in 1985, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies develops a
number of themes that continue to animate the research agenda of today’s sociology of
punishment. This essay is a revised version of a new Preface written for the 2018
reprint edition of the book that reflects on its findings and method and their relevance
in the current conjuncture.

Keywords
discourse analysis, genealogy, penal-welfare institutions, social politics, strategies
of control

Punishment and Welfare was researched and written in the late 1970s and early
1980s at a historical moment very different from today. These were the closing
years of the post-war era—a 30-year period of growth and diminishing inequality
brought about by social democracy, managed capitalism, and an expanding wel-
fare state. Many of us who came of age in this exceptional phase of capitalist
development were prone to assume that these settled trends were likely to continue,
with the expansive, empowering, inclusionary forces of mass democracy pressing
towards greater equality and enhanced social justice. But already the ground was
beginning to shift. The 1970s had been a decade of economic stagnation, runaway
inflation, high unemployment, oil crises, and complaints that the British nation
was becoming “ungovernable.” Serious doubts were already being expressed about
the viability of Keynesian formulas for governing the economy and rightwing
critics pointed to the welfare state, the trade unions, and “socialist” politics as

Corresponding author:
David Garland, New York University, 40 Washington Square South, 340 Vanderbilt Hall, New York, NY
10012, USA.
Email: David.Garland@nyu.edu
268 Punishment & Society 21(3)

the causes of the growing economic malaise and sense of national decline. May
1979 saw the election of Mrs Thatcher, though it would be several years before her
administration developed a distinctive ideology and committed itself to the free-
market fundamentalism and public sector dismantling that would be her long-
term legacy.
We know now that this historical moment was a turning point leading to the
social and economic world that we presently inhabit: a world of resurgent capital,
reduced working class power, neo-liberal policies, and welfare state retrenchment.
But at the start of the 1980s, the balance of power between social democracy and
its opponents appeared much more even. Thatcherism, privatization, the attack on
organized labor, the culture of control, New Right policy prescriptions—all of
these were just beginning to take shape. The future seemed much more open
then than it does in retrospect.
It is true that far-sighted observers such as Stuart Hall (1980) were already
warning about a “drift into a law and order society” and the possibility that the
crisis might give rise to a more authoritarian politics. But many still believed that
contemporary struggles might result in a renewed social democracy—perhaps even
a democratic socialism—that would be more open, more egalitarian, and more
effective in taming capitalism than were the welfare state and mixed economy that
had emerged out of post-war reconstruction.
At the same moment, though for rather different reasons, Britain’s penal insti-
tutions (and their equivalents in the US and elsewhere) were being assailed by
forceful criticism of their underlying philosophy and recurring complaints about
their ineffectiveness and injustice. Like the welfare state project of which it formed
a part, the forward march of penal progress abruptly stalled and its future sud-
denly seemed uncertain.
After the best part of a century during which progressive penology and penal
reform had become synonymous with what Francis Allen (1981) called “the reha-
bilitative ideal”, academics and practitioners began to entertain serious doubts
about the value of that whole framework. And though some of the old guard
pushed back against the critics, insisting that reformative penal institutions were
a mark of moral decency and a civilized society, the most common response was a
retreat into doubt and ambivalence. Liberal elites and penological experts contin-
ued to value social justice, prisoner welfare, and a reformative penology but they
found it impossible to deny the practical problems of actually-existing correction-
alism, or to discount the principled objections that the penal system increasingly
attracted. Practices that had long seemed positive and progressive—such as inde-
terminate sentencing, the individualization of punishment, juvenile courts, or reha-
bilitative treatment—now came to be viewed as illiberal, paternalistic, and prone to
bias and arbitrariness. And since the promised crime-reduction effects of this
correctionalist approach had failed to materialize, supporters found it difficult to
mount a defense. By the early 1980s we had entered a transitional moment in
Garland 269

which academics and practitioners were struggling to figure out a principled

approach to punishment and the power relations that underpinned it.
Punishment and Welfare set out to diagnose the sources of this ambivalence.
It aimed to develop an in-depth analysis of correctional criminal justice and the
contradictory logics, values and assumptions inscribed within it—an undertaking
that would, I hoped, allow me to resolve some of the confusion and misunder-
standings that characterized contemporary debates. But rather than undertake a
philosophical analysis of penological ideas and values, I approached the problem
by means of a historical investigation, asking how the laws, practices, and institu-
tions of punishment had come to be structured in their modern forms and exam-
ining the deliberative, often contentious processes out of which our modern
assumptions about the offender, the criminal act, and the reformative penal
state had emerged. The aim, in short, was to follow Michel Foucault’s lead and
write a “history of the present” uncovering the political and ideological struggles
that had given rise to modern penal practice.
The book’s project was shaped, quite explicitly, by the political and penological
conjuncture in which it was launched. Its aim was to uncover the power relations
and ideological frames that were inscribed in modern penal policy; to show how
the discourses and practices of Britain’s penal institutions had been forged in now-
forgotten political struggles at the start of the 20th century; and to demonstrate
how the specific compromises and contradictions generated by these struggles—
and not the supposed illiberalism of welfare or the impossibility of reform—had
worked to undermine the reformative potential of penal-welfare institutions while
simultaneously strengthening their individualizing controls and class bias.
The project assumed that a genealogical analysis of the modern penal-welfare
system at the moment of its emergence would enable us to see more clearly how its
discourses and practices were shaped by specific struggles, thereby recovering the
politics and the power relations that the passage of time and the work of ideology
had long since concealed. Punishment and Welfare should thus be read as a critical
genealogy—a historical inquiry focused not on penal policy but on penal strategy;
an anatomy of social control and class discipline disguised as penal reform. Its
focus is on a historical time and place—Britain between 1890 and 1914—when the
power to punish came to be instituted as an element of welfare state
governmentality.
If Punishment and Welfare was shaped by the political conjuncture out of which
it emerged, it was also, and more directly, influenced by the sociological and his-
torical literature that existed at that time. As compared to today when
“punishment and society” is a prominent and popular field of study, in the early
1980s the sociology of punishment was just beginning to emerge as a distinct
academic specialism. Historical studies had done much to shape the research
agenda, with works by Fine et al. (1979), Hay (1975), Ignatieff (1978), Melossi
and Pavarini (1981), and Rusche and Kirchheimer (1969), developing a neo-
Marxist analysis of penal history and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977)
270 Punishment & Society 21(3)

opening up a new and more concrete understanding of the power to punish. In

most of these studies, the emphasis was on the class struggles that structured penal
policy, the social control functions of penal law, and the role of penal institutions
in reproducing ruling class hegemony and capitalist structures. Ideas and culture
were downplayed as sources of penal practice and material interests, power rela-
tions, and ideological processes were very much to the fore. Whig histories of penal
progress were out: anatomies of penal power were in.
As the new sociology of punishment split off from penology and penal philos-
ophy it addressed itself to two fundamental questions—the relationship between
punishment and social structure and the causes of large-scale penal change—and it
did so chiefly by analyzing the birth of the modern prison and its relationship to
the economic and social structures of late 18th and early 19th century society. For
certain writers, this was a reprise, in the penal realm, of the classic Marxist ques-
tions about the relationship of “base” to “superstructure” and of the historical
processes that secured the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. And
out of this Marxist problematic there emerged some brilliant analyses—most nota-
bly by Douglas Hay (1975) and E. P. Thompson (1975)—of the role of criminal
law, penal rituals, and legal ideologies in the formation of a bourgeois state and the
reproduction of capitalist rule. In relation to this intellectual moment, Foucault’s
intervention was both an extension of existing themes (e.g. the background
assumption in Discipline and Punish that the rise of the disciplines and techniques
for the moralization of workers were linked to the emergence of capitalism) and an
opening up of new questions—about the relation of knowledge to power; the
importance of the human sciences in shaping and legitimating punishment; and
the role of penal technologies in broader patterns of exercising power and subju-
gating individuals. Not the least of its innovations was to pose the question of how
the science of “criminology” was linked to the modern prison and associated forms
of “knowledge–power.”
If the focus of prior work had been the emergence of the prison and modern
criminal law in the early 19th century, the focus of Punishment and Welfare was
on the penal and social transformations of a century later when the institutional
foundations of the modern welfare state were put in place. The question that
originally motivated my inquiry was a Marxist one: how did the economic con-
juncture and class struggles that produced the welfare state affect criminal law and
criminal punishment? How did the shift from 19th century liberal capitalism to
20th century monopoly capitalism restructure the principles and practices of crim-
inal punishment—if not directly, then via the emergence of new class relations, new
state responsibilities, and new ideologies of social inclusion and citizenship? The
basic premise of the study—supported by an observed correlation between pat-
terns of penal and social law reform in the first decade of the 20th century—was
that the new institutions of welfare government (social insurance, social work,
state-sponsored social control, etc.) had reshaped the work of the penal system,
its ideas, and its practices. The historical-theoretical question was: how exactly had
this structural effect been achieved?
Garland 271

From the beginning, this was a study of structural transformation. But as the
research progressed, the focus moved away from the mode of production and the
penal consequences of its alterations to a more concrete analysis of shifts in pun-
ishment and the changing rationalities and power–knowledge relations that these
shifts entailed. This change of focus did not follow from a change of theoretical
loyalties on my part: it was instead an accommodation to the archival material I was
studying. Criminological discourses, criminal legislation, committee reports, official
descriptions of penal practice, institutional reforms—none of these bore a direct
relationship to mutations in capitalism but they did have clear affinities with con-
cepts such as discipline, normalization, knowledge–power, and subjectification. As
my empirical inquiry proceeded, Foucauldian concepts simply gained
more traction.
From the beginning, too, the study’s scope was wider than that of conventional
penal history. Being concerned with the state, ideology and class control, it became a
study of two historical regimes of regulation—the “Victorian” and the “Modern”—
each of which included not just penal institutions but also the loosely-coupled
institutions of charity, welfare, and labor market that played a role in the day-to-
day governance of working people and the disciplining of the poor.
Punishment and Welfare starts from an account of British penality in the mid-
Victorian era that traces the links between the details of penal practice and the
broader structures of social and economic relations. It describes how Victorian
penal institutions interpellated the offender as a free, equal, responsible legal sub-
ject; the individualism implicit in the prison’s insistence on cellular isolation; the
disciplinary work-ethic imposed by the unproductive prison labor regime; the
absence of state aid for offenders; and the operative conception of punishment
as a social contract response to an individual who freely chooses to break the law.
The parallels between these penological principles and the political ideology of
laissez-faire individualism; their affinity with the conception of a minimalist
state; the deterrent, less-eligible policies that characterized the workhouse as
well as the prison—all of these are presented as evidence that Victorian penality
was structured by the institutions and ideologies of a laissez-faire, liberal, market
society. Taken together, these parallels pointed to an elective affinity—an ideolog-
ical and structural fit—linking penality into the circuits of the Victorian era’s
dominant ideology and its prevailing structure of class relations. The penological
conceptions and prison regimes of the 1870s and 1880s were, in effect, part of a
network of strategic links and structural homologies that rendered Victorian
penality congruent with the class relations, political ideologies, and social policies
of the time.
The transition from Victorian penality to the modern penal-welfare arrange-
ments that emerged after 1895 is presented as a complex historical process in which
competing (and sometimes converging) reform movements and interest groups
played a part. Proponents of a new scientific criminology; advocates of eugenics
and social insurance; social workers and charity organizers; penal administrators
and New Liberal political reformers—all of these groups contributed to the
272 Punishment & Society 21(3)

debates of these years, and much of the book is taken up with descriptions of the
interaction between reform program advocates and the existing laws and policies,
and with the various conflicts and alliances that this produced.
These penal developments did not occur in isolation. Their intellectual forms,
ideological concerns, and political ambitions were part of a wider restructuring
movement that reorganized British social, political, and economic institutions and
constructed the social insurance state of the Edwardian period—a state that would
later, after years of mass unemployment and the bracing impact of World War II,
give rise to the Beveridge-Attlee welfare state.
One could link these penological developments to the economic and political
changes that Marxists describe as the transition from liberal to monopoly capital-
ism—and at times the book points to this connection. But the important issue is
less one of economic determinism than of causal interconnection. Economic
changes had political and ideological corollaries and vice versa. And developments
in social and penal policy were deeply embroiled in these transformations.
Questions of criminal law and penal policy—for example, the culpability of
offenders, the limits of criminal responsibility, the responsibilities of the state in
respect of the reform of offenders or aid to ex-prisoners, the design of institutional
regimes for correction or control—were intimately linked to other issues of social
policy, such as the administration of workhouses or the organization of the Poor
Law. And these in turn raised broader issues about the regulation of the labor
market, the proper role of the state, and the strategies to be adopted towards the
care and control of the poor.
The intersection of penal, social and economic issues—and the conscious rec-
ognition on the part of policymakers that these issues were in fact related—is well
evidenced in the official reports and recommendations published between 1895 and
1914: reports in which novel ways of thinking and acting were applied to a whole
range of otherwise separate penal and social problems. And these new social and
penal rationalities were empirically established when a series of penal-welfare
institutions was eventually put in place, organized around a new set of principles
and ideological commitments that marked it off from the liberalism of the 19th
century and linked it to the emerging mode of government that came to be known
as the welfare state. This new penality’s positive approach to the reform of
offenders; its extensive use of interventionist agencies; its deployment of social
work and psychiatric expertise; its concern to regulate, manage and normalize
rather than immediately to punish; and of course its “welfarist” self-representa-
tions—all of these combined to link Modern penality with the control strategies,
ideological forms, and class relations that characterized the British welfare state.
So Punishment and Welfare traces a structural transformation in patterns of
penal and social control, identifying new forms of power–knowledge and connect-
ing them to changing class relations and material conditions. In these respects, the
book remains true to its Marxist and Foucauldian provenance. But the thesis that
the book develops departs in some important respects from these theoretical
frameworks, not least in its denial of any base/superstructure determinism and
Garland 273

its insistence that discursive transformations come about in and through the
actions of agents whose interests and motivations can be inferred and whose
struggles can be documented.
The central theoretical claim of Punishment and Welfare is not that economic
structures determine penal outcomes but rather that penal outcomes are conscious-
ly negotiated within the limits that economic, political and ideological structures
impose. And these structures do not work all by themselves, somehow controlling
outcomes with an unseen hand or an automatic functionalism. Instead it is a
matter of situated, problem-solving, decision-making agents—in this case reform-
ers, administrators, policymakers, and politicians—who consciously perceive the
bounds of political possibility and adjust their actions accordingly, sometimes
struggling to change the rules of the game, more often making compromises
with the constraints that they face.
The assumption is that social and penal structures are made effective—and
either reproduced or made to change—through the medium of human action,
with all of the struggles and contested outcomes that reformative action generally
entails. Instead of supposing that penal forms are “determined” by a particular
mode of production or by a particular pattern of class relations, the book assumes
that penal forms are produced by conjunctural politics and by specific struggles
within the sphere of penality itself. The wider structures of economy, law, and
ideology—as well as the institutional grid of social policies—generate pressures
towards specific kinds of penal practice and limit the range of possible reforms. But
in the end, penal and social practices are constructed by the actors and agencies
most closely involved. Which is why, for all its concern with social and economic
structures, Punishment and Welfare foregrounds the analysis of programmatic dis-
course and reformative action.
The books’ approach is, for this reason, resolutely concrete and empirical. Its
archive consists of documents, texts, and discourses drawn from the world of social
science, law, penal reform, and government action and these primary materials are
situated within a broader account of social change derived from prior scholarship.
It focuses less on individual texts than on the reform programs that they collec-
tively constituted (with all their variants and internal disagreements), and it views
these programs not as simple scientific statements but instead as complex rhetorical
acts. The proponents of these reform programs argued among themselves and took
up varying positions, some more logically coherent or scientifically sound and
others more politically pragmatic. But they all sought to advance their ideas, to
persuade policymakers, and to find favor with officials and law-makers—and
much of the book focuses on the transformative processes that these
efforts entailed.
The result is a close analysis of discursive maneuvers, rhetorical figures, and
compromise formations, as they were constructed in a reform process bounded by
institutional and ideological structures. The details of these contestations have
been long since forgotten but the genealogical work of tracing these conflicts
and recovering their significance is more than merely “historical” to the extent
274 Punishment & Society 21(3)

that they gave rise to discursive and practical outcomes that survived until very
recently. To the extent that the outcomes of these struggles formed the historical a
priori—the unstated conditions of existence—underlying the penal-welfare sys-
tem’s power relations and structures of control, they are precisely what a history
of the present sets out to reveal.

References
Allen F (1981) The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Fine R, Kinsey R, Piccioto S, et al. (1979) Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From
Deviancy Theory to Marxism. London: Hutchinson.
Foucault M (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY:
Pantheon Books.
Hay D (1975) Property, authority, and the criminal law. In: Thompson EP, Hay D and
Linebaugh P (eds) Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in 18th Century England.
London: Peregrine.
Hall S (1980) Drifting into a Law and Order Society. London: Cobden Trust.
Ignatieff M (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution
1750–1850. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Melossi D and Pavarini M (1981) The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the
Penitentiary System. London: MacMillan Press.
Rusche G and Kirchheimer O (1969) Punishment and Social Structure. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press (Originally published New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1939).
Thompson EP (1975) Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act New York, NY:
Pantheon Books.

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor Law and Professor of

Sociology at New York University. He is the author of several books in the soci-
ology of punishment and control including Punishment and Welfare: A History of
Penal Strategies, which has just been re-published by Quid Pro Books.