Abstract

LENIS CASTANO, John Fredy. Dialectics of Punishment. Institution, Morality, and Control in Modern Societies. Estud. Polit. [online]. 2013, n.42, pp.196-217. ISSN 0121-5167.

This paper will approach the issue of the treatment of criminality and some of its consequences for the notion of punishment in neoliberal and controlling societies in late modernity. It expands the legalist idea of guilt stigmatization whenever it inserts itself into the paradigm of governmental rationality and control that operates on citizens through their own convictions and internalization of the laws -subjection and subjectivation- in the current security structure that gathers and transforms the legal, sovereignty, and discipline models. This study will show how legal guilt is modulated by various factors of modernity and its punishment logic, whose elements combine themselves materially, randomly (i.e. the punitive praxis and the randomness of an event), and rationally in accordance with the search for control and security characterizing the punitive policies of modernity. To this end, a mainly genealogical methodology shall be used, since the goal is not only to interpret some key texts of legal and criminological theory but also to point to several influences and tensions of economic and material rationality that have permeated the punitive process in the studied societies.

Keywords : Punishment; Modernity; Institution; Blaming Guilt; Security; Social Control; Criminality.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )