Overview
Most of the scholarly literature on sentencing is written from a legal or philosophical perspective. Legal scholarship analyzes sentencing law. Philosophical work analyzes the normative debates about the aims of punishment in a liberal democratic society. This chapter examines sentencing as a cultural practice. Culture refers to sets of shared meanings or collective representations. To study culture is to examine the ways in which meanings are defined, enacted, mediated, communicated, and shared by a range of actors and audiences. A cultural analysis of sentencing is a study of how certain important meanings are represented. These include representations of moral boundaries, of justice, and of legitimate decision-making processes. David Garland argues that penal institutions have important cultural dimensions and consequences which shape penal policies and practices.
Cultural categories, habits and sensibilities are embedded in and constitutive of our political and economic...
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Hutton, N. (2014). Sentencing as a Cultural Practice. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_489
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