Assimilation, Exclusion, and the End of Punishment

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37008-6
• Published date: 15 December 2005
• Date: 15 December 2005
• Pages: 161-198
• Author: Henry Kamerling

ASSIMILATION, EXCLUSION, AND

THE END OF PUNISHMENT

Henry Kamerling

ABSTRACT

This essay engages the work of sociologist George Herbert Mead and

political theorist William E. Connolly, applying a reading of their

understanding of the criminal other to the development of Illinois’ and

South Carolina’s penal systems at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Despite an inf‌lux of European immigrants, Illinois politicians and prison

off‌icials fashioned an approach to corrections that relied on rehabilitation

through assimilation as the core component of disciplining its convict

population. In contrast to this approach, South Carolina fashioned a

penology based upon the principle of exclusion, one that enshrined ret-

ribution over rehabilitation in the paradigm of punishment. The essay

concludes by comparing the importance of racial and ethno-cultural

politics in shaping regional and national debates over correctional policy

and by examining the primary function race plays in explaining the

current backlash against the rehabilitative ideal informing so much of

contemporary penology.

In his 1895 opus The Division of Labour, French sociologist E

´mile Durkheim

(1997) discussed the centrality of crime and its punishment to the formation

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 37, 161–198

Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37008-6

161

of social solidarity. Far from understanding crime as undesirable, Durkheim

argued that criminal behavior constituted an opportunity for the emotive

expression of shared moral outrage, an indignation rooted in what

Durkheim termed society’s ‘‘collective conscience.’’ For Durkheim, the

functional outcomes of punishment were not directly related to controlling

or even deterring crime, but to the important ritualistic way punishing crime

reaff‌irmed the moral order and strengthened social solidarity. Thus,

Durkheim understood society as gaining stability primarily through its

ability to def‌ine and punish the deviant outsider, the criminal other.

Durkheim’s exploration of the role of crime in the creation of social

stability has provided subsequent scholars a powerful lens through which to

analyze social relations built around penal practices. Writing at the close of

World War I, sociologist George Herbert Mead (1918) argued, like

Durkheim, that the criminal played a necessary role in the formation of

social cohesion. Mead observed that, ‘‘the cry of ‘stop thief’ unites us all as

property owners against the robber.’’ In this sense then, it is society’s re-

vulsion at the criminal and the criminal act that reveal for Mead the ‘‘y

common, universal values which underlie like a bedrock the divergent

structures of individual ends that are mutually closed and hostile to each

other.’’ It is the criminal who unites society’s disparate elements, providing

social stability. Mead understood the important role that the criminal plays

in social reproduction by generating group cohesion. ‘‘Without the crim-

inal,’’ Mead concludes, ‘‘the cohesiveness of society would disappear and

the universal goods of the community would crumble into mutually repel-

lent individual particles’’ (p. 591).

Inf‌luenced both by the battlef‌ield carnage and nationalistic supra-

patriotism of World War I, Mead was more attuned than Durkheim to

the darker side or the social cohesion formed among the bonds of punitive

justice. Unlike Durkheim, Mead was primarily concerned about how

hostility and punitive passion, released in the act of punishment, would

reconf‌igure social relations. Any concern with the criminal other, or the

larger social conditions productive of criminal activity, Mead saw as ob-

literated by the punitive zeal unleashed when the impulse of hostility was

aroused. Mead observed that the various attempts to ‘‘remove the causes of

crime, to assess the kind and amount of punishment which the criminal

should suffer in the interest of society, or to reinstate the criminal as a law-

abiding citizen has failed utterly’’ (p. 588). He concluded that ‘‘hostility

toward the lawbreaker inevitably brings with it the attitudes of retribution,

repression, and exclusion’’ (p. 590). Interested in an agenda that would

lessen the tug of such forces on society’s approach to dealing with the

HENRY KAMERLING162

criminal other, Mead sought a path toward what he termed the ‘‘great

civilizing agents’’ that would allow society to ‘‘absorb the hostilities of

different groups’’ (pp. 593–594). To this end, Mead called for the adoption

of a broad range of progressive era reforms including better housing,

superior education, greater vocational guidance, more attention to sanita-

tion and hygiene, and the development of community social centers and

parks, along with laws establishing juvenile courts and legislation aimed at

controlling child labor. Such action, Mead understood would not remove

hostility altogether, but he hoped it would soften the elements of ‘‘regulative

and repressive justice,’’ while inaugurating a ‘‘shift from retribution

to prevention’’ (pp. 583, 587) as the hallmark feature guiding society’s

approach to both understanding the criminal other and the practices of

punishment.

Writing toward the end of the twentieth century, the political theorist

William E. Connolly (1995) takes up much the same issues as Mead did

earlier. Like Mead, Connolly understands the role of the deviant other in

generating social cohesion and like Mead, Connolly too worries about the

degenerative impact the impulse of hostility has upon the operation of the

criminal-justice system. At the heart of the call to punishment Connolly

insists one can hear ‘‘the call to revenge’’ (p. 42). Connolly understands the

revenge as playing an important role in concealing the relationship between

the categories of responsibility and monstrosity in the architecture of crime

and punishment. He explains that the larger society depicts the criminal

other as both a responsible and rational agent in the commission of crime,

while at the same time constructing the outlaw as a monstrous devil op-

erating in an irrational world beyond the pale of the broadly conceived

human community. This combination of agency and monstrosity creates the

criminal as deserving of the most severe penalties. ‘‘The call to revenge

inhabits the murky spaces within and between these categories,’’ Connolly

insists, and ‘‘inf‌iltrates legal justice, closing up uncertainties within it’’

(pp. 42, 45). By obscuring the connection between responsibility and mon-

strosity the call to revenge prevents the interrogation of the natural supe-

riority assumed by the larger social group insists upon the most ruthless

delivery of punishment for the law breaker. ‘‘If ‘we’ made the line between

responsibility and monstrosity too clear and clean,’’ Connolly argues, ‘‘we

might never be allowed to punish criminals inhabiting minority subject po-

sitions with the severity we demand.’’ Any critical responsiveness would

force society to examine its foundational assumptions residing at the heart

of the call to punishment, forcing it to acknowledge the role the other plays

in the construction of the self. For Connolly, the result of this impulse for

Assimilation, Exclusion, and the End of Punishment 163