TITLE:
Theories of Punishment in the Age of Mass Incarceration: A Closer Look at the Empirical Problem Silenced by Justificationism (The Brazilian Case)
AUTHORS:
Salo Carvalho
KEYWORDS:
Punishment; Penology; Theories of Punishment
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.1 No.4,
September
26,
2013
ABSTRACT: The paper examines three central problems
involving punitive social control in recent decades: first, the steady increase in the number of
incarcerated people (the phenomenon of great confinement), with special
emphasis on the Brazilian case; second, the way criminology interprets
contemporary confinement (New Penology); and finally, the lack of a (dogmatic)
criminal law theory on the reality of mass incarceration. Incarceration data are
presented here as premises in
order to inquire about the relations between the (normative-philosophical)
theories regarding the justification of punishment and the (empirical)
phenomena of mass incarceration. The questions behind the current reflection
are therefore about what role criminal theories play in the expansion or
contraction of the power to punish (potestas
puniendi) and the explanations the justification models offer to the problem
of hyper-punishment.