Copyright SAGE Publications

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1462-4745; Vol 11(2): 259268
DOI: 10.1177/1462474508104428

PUNISHMENT
& SOCIETY

A culturalist theory of
punishment?
DAVID GARLAND
New York University, USA

Punishment and culture, Philip Smith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
183 pp. $19.00 (pbk). ISBN 9780226766102.

Times have changed. Twenty-five years ago, sociologists of punishment neglected culture
in their efforts to identify the social causes and consequences of penal institutions. In
a field revolutionized by neo-Marxist histories and Foucauldian genealogies the focus
was on class control and techniques of discipline rather than cultural meanings and
sensibilities. In those days, if culture was studied at all, it was in the guise of normal-
izing discourses embedded in techniques of penal power, or else systems of ideology
that reproduced ruling class hegemony. And the point of studying these narrowly
conceived cultural forms for that is what they are was not to trace their multiple
meanings and dialogic possibilities but more narrowly to gauge their instrumental effects
in furthering penal control.
Today, following a remarkable expansion and refinement in penal history and
sociology, the question of culture has become much more pertinent to the study of
punishment. It is no longer novel or controversial to observe that penal institutions are
grounded in cultural values and perceptions (Downes, 1988; Garland, 1990, 2005;
Wiener, 1990; Melossi, 2001; Simon, 2001; Vaughan, 2002; Whitman, 2003;
Savelsberg, 2004; Sarat and Boulanger, 2005); that they draw upon specific sensibilities
and express particular emotions (Spierenburg, 1984; Garland, 1990; Duncan, 1996;
Miller, 2000; Smith et al., 2000; Vaughan, 2000; Tonry, 2001; Crawley, 2004); that they
are the sites of ritual performance and cultural production (Arasse, 1989; Gerould, 1992;
Garland, 2002; Smith, 2003; Savelsberg and King, 2005) or that they give rise to diffuse
cultural consequences quite above and beyond any crime control effects they may
produce (Bender, 1987; Garland, 1991; Sarat, 2001). Against this background, it was
merely a matter of time before someone bent the stick all the way back and proposed
a fully culturalist theory of punishment. Which is precisely what Philip Smith has
now done.
Philip Smiths Punishment and culture is a brief, combative work of social theory that
uses a series of historical case studies each re-interpreting a notable penal institution
or its transformation to make the case for a culturalist approach to the analysis of
punishment. Major theoretical interventions are still rare in this field, and Smiths book,

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which is self-consciously theoretical, well researched and forcefully argued, is an import-

ant contribution that deserves our full attention.
Punishment and culture stands at the intersection between two large-scale works-in-
progress: the sociology of punishment and cultural sociology. In its fundamental methods
and conception, the book is a product of the strong program in cultural sociology, an
intellectual project headquartered in Yale Universitys Center for Cultural Sociology of
which Smith is associate director. (For a programmatic statement, see http://
research.yale.edu/ccs/about/strong-program). The strong programs aim is to remake
sociology as a structural hermeneutics centered on questions of meaning, committed to
an autonomous conception of culture, and dedicated to illuminating the powerful role
that culture plays in shaping human action and social life. Viewed as a contribution to
that project, Punishment and culture is an extended demonstration of what a muscular
cultural sociology can make of a specific social field a field which in this case is punish-
ment and penal institutions, though Smith has also written on the cultural logic of war
(Smith, 2005) and the approach is, in principle, applicable to any social domain.
But Smiths book is also, and more explicitly, a critical intervention in the sociology
of punishment. The author challenges this fields dominant theoretical approach
which he takes to be a hermeneutically thin power-and-control perspective derived
from Foucault and seeks to replace it with a radically anti-Foucauldian position
(p. 16). The alternative perspective Smith presents is a neo-Durkheimian framework
that develops thick descriptions of penal methods, attends to how punishment is
discussed in popular culture, and aims for meaning-rich analyses that decode punish-
ments symbolism and trace its roots down to deeply embedded cultural codes.
Smith describes his approach as Durkheimian and it certainly draws inspiration from
Durkheims late work, especially The elementary forms of the religious life (Durkheim,
1968) and the socio-religious concepts (the sacred, pure and polluted, totem and taboo,
etc.) contained therein. But many of the more familiar elements of Durkheimian
analysis are absent here: Smith wants nothing to do with functionalism, or social
morphology, or laws of penal evolution, or even with solidarity effects. His Durkheim
is a decidedly culturalist perhaps idealist thinker who keeps company with literary
theorists and the leading lights of contemporary cultural studies.
Smiths starting point for analysis is Durkheims account of the expressive, communi-
cative aspects of penal rituals an account that is by now well established in the punish-
ment literature (Laqueur, 1989; Garland, 1990; Kennedy, 2000). But Smith adds new
layers of complexity and interest to this account by elaborating the range of meanings
and emotions that punishments can engender and connecting these to (what he takes
to be) deeper and more universal cultural processes. He shows how the meanings of
penal institutions are narrated and re-narrated in civil society in ways that can subvert
the official story and generate classificatory contradictions. He shows how certain penal
institutions the guillotine, the electric chair, the Supermax prison achieve iconic
cultural status and come to be surrounded by myths and legends, eventually becoming
consumption goods in the entertainment zone. He points to punishments connections
to the binary oppositions of sacred and profane, good and evil, orderly and disorderly.
And he points to the mysteriously dark, dreadful fascination that punishment can
sometimes exert on the public imagination, explaining this strange charismatic power
by reference to punishments connection with the sacred.

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GARLAND A culturalist theory of punishment?

Smiths application of the Durkheimian concepts is sometimes so all-embracing as to

rob them of precision everything that is valued becomes sacred, everything criticized
becomes polluted and I am doubtful about the capacity of timeless socio-religious
categories adequately to capture the meaning of contemporary cultural processes. But
his analyses are interesting and often persuasive, and the focus on punishments deeper
cultural resonances generates insights that are often fresh and original.
To advance the work of explication and interpretation Smith introduces the ideas of
Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) with his dialogic conception of a public culture that can trans-
form the states canonical discourse into a more pluralistic, multivalent, sometimes
subversive set of meanings; Roland Barthes (1957) with his rules for semiotic analysis
and his account of the role of mythologies in everyday life; and Mary Douglas (1966)
with her stress on the trouble caused by ambivalent classification and the social effort
that goes into maintaining categorical boundaries. And, of course the method of thick
description the effort to develop an in-depth description of an act by placing it within
the dense network of framing intentions and cultural meanings that give it its situated
sense is taken from Clifford Geertz (1973), though Geertz himself would have
little time for Smiths Levi-Straussian talk about binary oppositions and universal
cultural codes.
Rather than present his new-and-improved Durkheimian semiotics of punishment as
a supplement to more materialist or more power-based theories, or better, as an elabor-
ation and extension of them, Smith sets out to press the claims of a culturalist approach
in opposition to these others. He wants Durkheim to become the intellectual center of
gravity for work in this field (p. 23) describing Foucault, in a different celestial metaphor,
as the pole to be avoided and Durkheim as that to which we should set our compass
(p. 8). Accordingly, the book is presented as an extended critique of the Foucauldian
approach to punishment an approach which Smith takes as a kind of proxy for the
field as a whole, though this view of things seems a little dated given the important place
the field has accorded to culture, sensibility and symbolism over the last 15 or 20 years.
(So for example when Smith describes the New Penology thesis (Feeley and Simon,
1992) as an example of Foucaults enduring spirit (p. 3) he neglects to mention the later
revisions to that theory which highlight the cultural context in which the New Penology
operates and the ways in which the publics ideas about crime and punishment limit its
reach and bowdlerize its technical ideas (Simon and Feeley, 2003).)
Smith contends that Foucaults description of carceral and normalizing practices as
mutely instrumental forms of power/knowledge imposed on a docile population needs
to be countered by a focus on punishments meaningful dimensions and the ways in
which these meanings come to be subverted and re-narrated in civil society. Instead of
reading modern punishment as technical rationality the dull compulsion of discipline
and surveillance Smith insists on highlighting the lively cultural debates that surround
some penal institutions, the multiple meanings imposed on them by diverse onlookers,
and the morbid fascination that punishments and their mythologies sometimes take
on in the public imagination. The five central chapters of the book discuss the public
execution, the prison (not just any prison, but the much-discussed institutions at
Newgate, Pentonville, Mettray, Supermax and Club Fed), the Panopticon, the
guillotine and the electric chair. Each chapter presents a close reading of the cultural
inputs (clunky term) that shaped the punishments designs, the public debates that

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transformed their meanings and the symbolic associations that formed up around
them: all this by way of an exemplification of his approach and a critique of Foucaults
alternative.
These case studies are, for me, the books real highlight and central contribution. Each
well-crafted account discusses a specific penal institution, drawing on Smiths own
research, which turns up some new gems of information and insight, as well as a thorough
reading of the secondary literature. Each one makes a slightly different point, though
running through all of them is a cluster of Durkheimian themes that Smith presents as
the core of the theoretical framework he proposes for the sociology of punishment. Thus
we have the idea of pollution (crime is a pollution to be ritually cleansed, though penal
institutions can, in turn, become polluted); of the sacred (the life-and-death drama of
criminal punishment connects with higher powers, and with the sinister mysteries
of the supernatural); of the mythological (the related tendency to spin narrative webs of
symbolic association around particularly resonant punishments); of the role of civil society
(in re-narrating the States institutions, ascribing them new meanings, challenging the
legitimacy of their classifications and claims); and the cult of the individual (the central
value of modern society, supposedly protected by state punishment but sometimes
affronted by harsh penal methods that rob the punished person of autonomy and dignity).
The chapter on the public execution develops a fascinating account of the way
condemned men and women used the performative opportunities of the scaffold-stage
to strike an appealing cultural pose (the martyr, the picaresque rogue, the gentleman,
the rake, the sympathetic victim) performances that sometimes caught the imagin-
ation of the crowd and transformed the perceived meaning of the event. And Smith
makes an excellent point when he observes that contemporary death penalty protocols
in the USA are culturally constrained to respect the autonomy of the condemned even
as he is being put to death. But his argument that public executions were abolished
because of the growing incongruity between the unruly sights, sounds and smells of
hanging days and the cultural sensibilities of 19th-century elites is, by now, old news.
Moreover, the cultural historians who best developed this claim McGowen (1987),
Laqueur (1989), Masur (1989), Gatrell (1994), Madow (1995) and Halttunen (1998)
each offer more complex multi-dimensional explanations that go beyond Smiths
either/or claim that it was considerations of culture and not matters of power and
control that brought about the reform.
Smiths discussion of famous prisons and their shifting place in the social imaginary
(as temples of purification, as gothic horrors, as houses of fun) is likewise creative and
interesting, and offers a sociological re-interpretation of the kind of cultural material
psycho-analyzed by Martha Grace Duncan (1996) in Romantic outlaws, beloved prisons.
Generalizing from his case studies, he argues that the prison, as an institution, is chron-
ically prone to boundary problems and classification difficulties. Actual prisons are
constantly violating public conceptions of what an ideal prison should be always being
viewed as too harsh or too soft, always setting out as model prisons only to fall back into
unruly disrepair. This process which Smith describes as genre creep (another clunky
term) or category violation causes cultural disquiet and generates demands for penal
reform. Thus we see Newgate, Pentonville, Mettray and the supermax prisons move back
and forth from one genre (the model reformatory) to another (the squalid bastille), some-
times ending up think of Alcatraz as tourist destinations and popular entertainments.

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GARLAND A culturalist theory of punishment?

In his very informative discussion of the Panopticon the influential inspection

house design developed by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s and propelled by Foucault
onto the intellectual landscape again 200 years later Smith returns to Benthams
original letters to argue that the Benthamite scheme was different in important respects
from the one Foucault portrays. Some of Smiths discussion here is beside the point as
far as his critique is concerned: it is hardly surprising to learn that Benthams concep-
tion was shaped by the cultural ideas of its time, and that he envisioned a series of more
positive aims (education, health, private profit, tax relief ) in addition to grinding rogues
honest and idle men industrious (Bentham, 1843, vol. X: 226). But it is useful to be
reminded that Benthams institution was intended to be viewed by tourists and visiting
members of the public their natural curiosity ensuring that the inspectors would them-
selves be inspected and that it was designed to combine discipline with display, austere
surveillance with entertaining spectacle.
As an interesting aside, Smith offers the historical speculation that Bentham may have
conceived his inspection house upon visiting the popular Rotunda at Ranelagh House
just outside London the Rotunda being a large wooden hall in which private viewing
boxes were arranged around the circular perimeter to face a central bandstand, thus
providing a space for social intercourse, display, and mutual observation (p. 107). As
it turns out, Smith is not the first scholar to link the Panopticon to the Rotunda Alan
Liu (1989) discussed the two designs together in an article on the new historicism in
literary studies. And though neither Smith nor Liu seem aware of it, there is some
internal evidence in Benthams correspondence that gives support to their speculation:
in a letter to Earl Spencer of 16 August 1793, Bentham mentions the Rotunda and
points out that the two buildings resemble one another: [the panopticon building] will,
I hope . . . be an ornament to the neighbourhood; not less than the rotunda at Ranelagh,
to which it will have a considerable degree of resemblance (Bentham, 1843, Appendix:
Panopicon Correspondence: 107). This direct connection between the penal and the
popular-cultural is a nice illustration of Smiths theoretical approach.
We might add a further item to Smiths catalogue of the ways in which Foucaults
account of the Panopticon diverges from Benthams original scheme a point that serves
to blur Foucaults too-sharp distinction between discipline and punishment. A
moments thought makes it plain that, even in the perfect disciplinary machine, there
has to be some punishment mechanism to deal with non-compliance. And in fact
Bentham admits as much though neither Foucault nor Smith makes any mention of
it. For the purposes of punishing recalcitrant inmates, Bentham rejected whips and
chains, as we might expect, but it is interesting to discover that he favored analogous
punishments as the necessary penal back-up, since this is a style of punishment that
Foucault contrasts to the disciplinary method that he takes the Panopticon to exemplify.
As Bentham put it, Outrageous clamour may be subdued and punished by gagging;
manual violence, by the strait waistcoat; refusal to work by a denial of food till the task
is done (Bentham quoted in Semple, 1993: 127).
In other words and as Smith suggests the real-world Panopticon, even the real-
world idea of the Panopticon, was never the pure form of discipline that it became in
Foucaults usage. Would any of this have troubled Foucault? Not at all. No more than
an empirical deviation from an ideal type would have surprised Max Weber. Still, the
fact that Bentham envisioned a theatrical aspect to the Panopticons functioning and

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that he chose to employ punishments that operate by means of symbolic associations,

conveys a more complex and interesting picture of Benthams work than that which
Foucault provides.
Smiths final substantive chapters deal with the guillotine and the electric chair, each
of which has become the stuff of myth and legend, the one an instantly recognizable
symbol of Revolutionary France, the other, a sinister American icon, endlessly repro-
duced on silk-screened Warhol prints and Hollywood movie screens. In each case, the
new-fangled lethal contraption was introduced to solve a particular cultural (I would
say political-cultural) problem the revolutionaries desire for a more humane, more
egalitarian, more republican punishment to replace the executioners sword; and the
desire of certain American officials to make state executions appear more civilized and
humane in the wake of some ugly hangings. To Smiths analysis, I would add the obser-
vation that New York States introduction of the electric chair in the late 1880s appears
to have been prompted by a more specific consideration the wish to distinguish its
capital punishment practice from the conduct of southern lynch mobs whose savage
violence had recently given a new and unwelcome meaning to the age-old symbol of
the noose. This example of symbolic contamination fits Smiths framework perfectly. It
also helps explain why other nations, such as Britain, felt no pressing need to abandon
hanging as a method of execution.
Smiths cultural analysis of these penal icons is often fascinating as well it might be,
given the literature, art and popular imaginings that these two monsters have spawned
as is his account of their transformation from symbols of penal progress to relics of
barbarism, fit only for wax museum and Halloween props. And he is on to something
important when he observes that: Like sex, death and religion, punishment is a field of
human activity that is vulnerable to eruptions of the primal, the mysterious, and the
awe-inspiring, to the emergence of powers understood as being beyond human control
(p. 172). What is less convincing is his attempt to explain the shared trajectory of the
guillotine and the chair by reference to an underlying culture structure that somehow
shapes thought and feeling about these matters on both sides of the Atlantic. At a
moment when comparative analysis is just taking off in the sociology of punishment, it
is something of a retrograde step to find a theorist treating France and the USA as if they
are, for these purposes, more or less the same place, organized around the same cultural
categories and sentiments. The study of punishment would be better served by adopting
the Geertzian premise that cultural meaning is shaped in local usage rather than positing,
with Smith and Levi-Strauss, the existence of universal cultural codes that can only be
specified in the vaguest of terms.
To this point, I have focused on Smiths case studies and his discussion of the cultural
conflicts and creativity that surround practices of punishment. But what of his larger
project? What of his ambition to establish a truly cultural sociology of punishment
(p. 12)? Here I have some important reservations: not about the value of cultural analysis
but about Smiths insistence on discussing punishments cultural meaning and determi-
nants as if these were distinct from, and more determinative than, considerations of
power and control. This, no doubt, is a polemical strategy on Smiths part a way of
pressing the claims of the strong program in cultural sociology but his privileging of
punishments cultural dimensions to the neglect of all else is, for the sociology of punish-
ment, a theoretical regression rather than a theoretical advance.

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GARLAND A culturalist theory of punishment?

In order to inaugurate his new approach with the maximum rhetorical flair Smith
proceeds to throw down the gauntlet to Michel Foucault (p. 8) who stands accused of
seeing modern punishment as meaningful only in a desiccated, instrumentally rational
sense (p. 11). And Smith deploys each of his case studies to argue that a culturalist
approach is more illuminating, more explanatory and more aligned with the historical
facts than Foucauldian alternatives that frame their analysis in terms of power, control
or political legitimacy.
Using a style of argumentation borrowed from Durkheims own writing which
assumes that if a competing theory can be proven false, the Durkheimian theory must
therefore be true Smith develops his claims by means of a dialectical disproof in which
Foucaults approach (as characterized by Smith) serves as the antithesis to Smiths
Durkheimian thesis. This way of going at things gives the book a polemical force that
dramatizes Smiths claims and suggests a kind of counter-paradigm that can compete
with that of Foucault. But it also has a number of serious drawbacks, not least its tendency
to make Smiths claims in an overstated form, which has the paradoxical effect of under-
mining them. (Here Smith is subject to a cultural effect that he himself describes the
tendency of audiences to respond negatively to anything they regard as unfair.)
The momentum of his polemic prompts Smith who knows his Foucault to present
interpretations of Discipline and punish and its implications that are often forced and
tendentious. To provide just one example: Foucaults contrastive distinction between
modern disciplinary sanctions (which work directly on the body) and semio-techniques
of punishment (which use symbolic representations to form mental associations) is
twisted into a supposed Foucauldian claim that modern punishment has become
altogether cut off from the wider spheres of meaning and judgment (p. 12). It is easy
to show that such a claim is, as Smith writes, quite simply wrong (p. 12), more diffi-
cult to show that Foucault ever made it or would ever have believed it to be true.
Foucaults work functions as a foil, and Smiths readings are shaped accordingly.
Despite Smiths insistence, the logic of his dialectical argument does not in fact suggest
the substitution of Durkheim for Foucault, culture for power, mythos for techne or
meaning for machinery. Instead it points to the need for a more developed synthesis that
can integrate these terms into a multi-dimensional framework. This is a position that
Smith explicitly rejects at the start of the book by rejecting, I should disclose, the
theoretical synthesis approach set out in Garland (1990) only to wind up more or less
accepting it by the end. At that end-point, the reader realizes that the assault on Foucault
has really been more of a sparring match, a kind of exercise or theoretical work-out,
intended to showcase the strengths of Smiths frame rather than knock out the contend-
ing alternative. If like me, you spend much of the book thinking to yourself But surely
these interpretations are not mutually exclusive it will come as a relief but also an anti-
climax to find Smith doing his about-turn in the conclusion and admitting that a
reconciliation synthesis is, in fact, required. You might also wonder whether Smith
ought not to have spent more time discussing the conceptual terms on which this
reconciliation might be based rather than pretending that multi-dimensional analysis is
unnecessary and undesirable (for a discussion of this problem, see Garland, 2006).
Smiths repeated rejection of power and control explanations in favor of culture and
meaning also prompts another reaction, which is more a matter of taste than of logic.
At a moment in American history when the penal systems economic and political effects

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have become more important than ever less through qualitative shifts in meaning than
because of massive shifts in quantity and extent it seems untimely and unconvincing
to stress poetics rather than power as the proper framework for penal analysis. Anyone
wishing to trace how punishment shapes life chances, distributes power and reinforces
racial divisions (Western, 2007), is unlikely to be drawn to Smiths approach, at least
not as a primary means of conceptualizing the phenomenon.
But even if we leave aside the politics of the present, there is something ill-judged
about emphasizing the primacy of culture over control in this particular sphere of social
life. At one point, Smith comments that the criminal body and the apparatus of [penal]
control are not so much nodes in the circuits of power as Foucault would have it but
tools for thinking. They are first and foremost symbols (p. 16). This gets it exactly back-
wards. Anyone observing criminal justice up close soon learns that control imperatives
are the alpha and omega of penal administrators decision making, with concerns about
public perception or cultural meaning operating as side-constraints rather than the other
way around. (Politicians and political discourse about punishment are another matter,
of course, as is the USAs system of capital punishment, which nowadays functions
primarily as a political rather than a penal practice.) Smith is no doubt correct to insist
that penal practice is an ongoing effort to control meaning. But it is also, and at the
same time, a massive machine for the control of bodies and behavior and our analyti-
cal frameworks should aim to embrace both of these dimensions rather than privilege
one at the expense of the other.
So, Smiths book has its frustrations, not least his insistence on counter-posing
explanations that are by no means mutually exclusive. But he succeeds in setting out,
with force and clarity, an important framework for the analysis of punishment a
cultural framework that is not altogether new, but to which Smith has added valuable
conceptual refinement and extensive, sometimes brilliant, empirical illustration.
What should we take away from Smiths challenge to the sociology of punishment? A
number of things I think: (1) the importance of public discourse and debate in shaping
the fate of penal measures and the inability of officials fully to control the meaning of
their actions so long as we remember that punishment is not a literary text, culture is
not the free play of meaning and contests over meaning always mobilize pre-existing
balances of power; (2) the close relation of punishment to mythic and religious themes
in our culture and the powerfully evocative effects that this can produce; (3) a new focus
on the sinister attraction of punishments and the ways in which penal institutions
become objects of fascination, fetishism, amusement and dread; (4) a cluster of related
concepts with which to study these phenomena, and finally; (5) a renewed sense of the
importance of theory, of theoretical dispute and of theoretical concepts not just for
directing research and organizing thought, but for shaping our fundamental sense of what
exactly it is that we are studying and how it might best be studied. These theoretical
insights and arguments, together with the richly researched case studies that exemplify
them, make this little book about meaning a more than usually significant one.

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DAVID GARLAND is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York
University. He is the author of Punishment and welfare (1985), Punishment and modern society (1990) and
The culture of control (2001), and a founding editor of Punishment & Society. He is currently completing a
book on Americas system of capital punishment.

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