Prisons, Penalty and Punishment

Abstract

Rationales for punishing deviant conduct in early medieval England legitimated the rise of various institutions of blood feud, fines, penal servitude and imprisonment, rehabilitative and corrective punishments, and restorative frameworks. Initially this chapter views the infliction of punishment as the actioning of a natural right in response to the offender’s guilt. In accordance with this orthodoxy, punishment is conceived as an essential form of retribution. Early modes of judicial punishment were thus regarded as essential to the maintenance of personal rights and liberties. The practice of vengeance in the form of the blood feud was deemed necessary for the regulation of early disputes, not simply for the well being or good order of the county, but because of the personal satisfaction it afforded the individual victim in righting a wrong. Early punishment was justified then as essential to the maintenance of respect for the liberty and rights of individual members of society. Respect for these rights demanded that should an offence occur, a punishment must follow. On this view, the victim of crime gained access to the body of the offender, and their immediate fate. Alternative perspectives redress offending in markedly different ways.