TWO FACETS OF CONSTITUTIVE

PENOLOGIAL THEORY

For the subject of

MODERN PENOLOGY
(Criminology 507)

Reported by:
Gina Marie Abigael M. Policarpio

Submitted to;
Dr. Lani T. Palmones
Dean, Graduate School of Criminal Justice Education
Metro Manila College
CONSTITUTIVE PENOLOGY
Constitutive penology is an extension of postmodernist constitutive criminological
theory. Its proponents argue that societal responses to crime are interrelated with the
wider society, particularly through “crime and punishment” talk.
Constitutive penology is an alternative vision for responding to harm without
simultaneously reproducing the prison-form or its constitutive parts. In order to avoid
engaging in such constitutive prison work, while nonetheless specifying how such
injury or violence can be addressed by examining two facets of constitutive
penological theory.

TWO FACETS OF CONSTITUTIVE PENOLOGICAL THEORY

THE CRIMINOLOGY OF THE SHADOW

-It’s a relative recent expression used to account punitive public attitudes. The
use of the term “shadow” in psychoanalytic circles is metaphorical in its account of
“one’s unconscious personality”.
-Punitive public attitudes cannot be easily explained by pointing to
instrumental concerns (e.g., fear of crime, personal victimization, or real or perceived
levels of crime). Instead, numerous observers have suggested that public
punitiveness is more a symptom of free-floating anxieties and insecurities resulting
from social change than a rational response to crime problems. We argue that these
public concerns might be better understood by drawing on the insights of
psychoanalytic theory, and we review relevant theoretical work to that effect.

UNDERSTANDING THE SHADOW

Although the metaphor of shadow projection is useful for understanding the function
that punitive attitudes might serve, the question still remains as to what this shadow
is that is being projected. Extant psychoanalytic theory on punitiveness seems to
suggest several different possibilities, including but not limited to the following, each
of which will be discussed in turn;
 . a sense of inferiority or shame at our own insignificance;
 . guilt over our own role in the creation of the crime problem; . sublimated
jealousy and admiration for the criminal’s exploits;
 . sadistic impulses to humiliate others; and
 . guilt regarding our own sexual desires.
Inferiority and Shame;
-‘‘inferiority complex,’’ suggests that aggression is often the result of concerns that
one lacks a desired quality.
- punishment is symbolic castration (or emasculation), hence a deflection of shame
from one person to another.
-motives behind crime and punishment are emotionally and symbolically identical.
According to Gilligan, ‘‘The greatest fear in each instance is that of being shamed or
laughed at’’. Punitiveness, like criminality then, is a means of warding off ‘‘underlying
feelings of personal insignificance or worthlessness’’.

Scapegoating and Guilt;

-Additional clues as to the nature of our cultural shadow might be found by
examining more closely the societal choice of scapegoats. Offenders who are
singled out for this projection typically fall into two broad stereotypes: the ‘‘gangster’’
and the sexual predator. The gangster archetype might be described as being
comprised of an underclass group: young, poor, male, gang-affiliated, drug-using,
drugselling, weapon-carrying minority member (or some combination of at least three
of these).
-The middle class is hardly unaware of the promotion of criminality that is inevitable
and inherent in processes of ghettoization, prisonization, stigmatization, and the
social exclusion of the poor. Such guilty knowledge is not easy to live with, and
therefore might need to be projected through a process of ‘‘responsiblilizing
offenders.’’ The idea that our ‘‘offenders’’ are only a stand-in or scapegoat
population— symptoms of an unequal and unfair society that we have partially
created and fully benefited from—may simply be too uncomfortable for most of us to
accept.
-If we are to punish (or arrest, convict, study, or classify) a person as an ‘‘offender,’’
the individual needs to be made responsible for the offense. In the face of a body of
social science research that seems to exculpate offending behavior by shifting blame
to parents, schools, communities, capitalism, and globalization, there is no small
comfort in at least having the scapegoat him- or herself taking full responsibility for
the crime.

Envy and Admiration;

-The idea that responses to crime evoke a wider range of emotions than those that
are publicly expressed has been explored by several commentators.
“the punitive energy shown by some individuals towards criminals can be interpreted as a guilty and
masochistic response to their own tendency to fantasize an identification with the criminal’s exploits
Garland (1990:65).”
- parents who unconsciously encourage criminality in their children to gratify their
own unacknowledged criminal impulses. In an altering gratification of the id and the
superego, ‘‘the same parents who unwittingly turn their children into criminals in this
manner frequently go on to denounce their children to the authorities’’.

Sadism and Schadenfreude;

-the fundamental hostility of human beings towards one another constitutes a
constant threat to civilised society. Rather than loving his neighbor and reserving his
power to defend himself from harm, man is led by this ubiquitous aggressive drive to
seek opportunities to exploit and sadistically attack others.
-The Frankfurt School’s Erich Fromm, one of the bestknown public analysts.
argument in his explanation for punitive public attitudes. “Fromm seeks to answer the
classic question of why society would cling so tightly to a penal system that clearly is
not effective at accomplishing its stated aims. One reason for this, he argues, is that
punitiveness is meant to provide the masses with a form of gratification for their
sadistic impulses”.
- pleasure in punishment was one manifestation of the sadistic impulses generated
by the will to power over others in punishing wrongdoers.

Sex, Guilt, and Ambivalence;

-The process of shadow projection might be most clearly evident in regards to
attitudes regarding the second general category of scapegoats on the punitive
landscape: namely, sex offenders and pedophiles. Much punitive energy is
dedicated to establishing the difference between sex offenders and ordinary people,
even between sex offenders and other violent offenders.
-A significant amount of empirical evidence testifies to the shared guilt that lies
beneath punitive responses to sex offenders. identify sexual violence as a prevalent
rather than an aberrant behavior.

THE CRIMINOLOGY OF THE STRANGER

-Examines ho the activities of the recovering subject and the transformative subject
recast the character of human agency as a constituents of a replacement discourse
and logic. This is a discourse that derealizes the notion of harm while humanizing the
offenders
The transformations we call the new penology involve shifts in three distinct
areas:
 The emergence of new discourses:
 The formation of new objectives for the system:
 The deployment of new techniques:

THE NEW DISCOURSE

-A central feature of the new discourse is the replacement of a moral or clinical
description of the individual with an actuarial language of probabilistic calculations
and statistical distributions applied to populations.
-These new doctrines rest upon actuarial ways of thinking about how to "manage"
accidents and public safety. They employ the language of social utility and
management, not individual responsibility.
-The discourse of the new penology is not simply one of greater quantification; it is
also characterized by an emphasis on the systemic and on formal rationality.

THE NEW OBJECTIVES

-The new penology is neither about punishing nor about rehabilitating individuals. It
is about identifying and managing unruly groups. It is concerned with the rationality
not of individual behavior or even community organization, but of managerial
processes. Its goal is not to eliminate crime but to make it tolerable through systemic
coordination.
- the shift away from trying to normalize offenders and toward trying to manage them
is seen in the declining significance of recidivism.
- old penology, recidivism was a nearly universal criterion for assessing successor
failure of penal programs
- new penology, recidivism rates continue to be important, but their significance has
changed. The word itself seems to be used less often precisely because it carries a
normative connotation that reintegrating offenders into the community is the major
objective.
-the new penology reshapes one's understanding of the functions of the penal
sanction. By emphasizing correctional programs in terms of aggregate control and
system management rather than individual success and failure, the new penology
lowers one's expectations about the criminal sanction. These redefined objectives
are reinforced by the new discourses discussed above.
NEW TECHNIQUES
-These new forms of control are not anchored in aspirations to rehabilitate,
reintegrate, retrain, provide employment, or the like. They are justified in more blunt
terms: variable detention depending upon risk assessment.
-This approach proposes a sentencing scheme in which lengths of sentence depend
not upon the nature of the criminal offense or upon an assessment of the character
of the offender, but upon risk profiles. Its objectives are to identify high-risk offenders
and to maintain long-term control over them while investing in shorter terms and less
intrusive control over lower risk offenders.