Punishment Effective In Crimes

While punishment can be effective in some cases, you can probably think of a few examples of when punishment does not reduce a behaviour.

Prison is one example. After being sent to jail for a crime, people often continue committing crimes once they are released from prison.

Researchers have found a number of factors that contribute to how effective punishment is in different situations. First, punishment is more likely to lead to a reduction in behaviour if it immediately follows the behaviour. Prison sentences often occur long after the crime has been committed, which may help explain why sending people to jail does not always lead to a reduction in criminal behaviour.

Second, punishment achieves greater negative results when it is aggressively

(Howell 2001)

This is only one step away from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Michel Foucault’s argument (in Discipline and Punish) that by embedding disciplinary systems in architecture and institutions rather than meting out direct retribution publicly, the likelihood of adverse public reaction to the punishment is greatly reduced.

Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being watched at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so (Foucault, 1989).

Foucault also posited that modern prisons evolved to sequester torture practices from public view. Bentham and Foucault speculated that by embedding punishment systems in prison architecture and institutions rather than meting out punishment openly through public execution or floggings, the State was able to greatly reduce the likelihood of adverse public reaction to the punishment of criminals (Hirst,

Public spaces undergo a makeover when the authorities and designers realise the need to move on from punishment to discipline, ‘from the fortress to a poetics of security.’ (Howell 2001)

The logic of a Poetics of Security dictates that, ‘in order to be effective, a design must be proscriptive, but appear humanist.’ In Davis’s (1992) terms, a space cannot be transparently militaristic; it must indeed deploy even more refined uses of discipline. Anything that can be perceived as a forced punishment or action can directly result in hostility amongst the people questioning the validity of such an adverse action.

Architecturally, in most respects, the resulting design does succeed in being accessible yet defensible, cosy yet ‘surveillable.’ Defensive architecture thus aims to communicate subtly with a corner of the subconscious of the users, to make them realise who they are and where they