Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon an individual or group, meted out by an authority.
It is a deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable.
It is, however, possible to distinguish between various different understandings of what punishment is.
The reasoning for punishment: to avoid self-endangerment, to impose social conformity, to defend norms, to protect against future harms and to maintain the law and respect for rule of law under which the social group is governed.
Justifications for punishment include: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation.
Punishment may be self-inflicted as with self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh in the religious setting
Impositions may include a fine, penalty, or confinement, or be the removal or denial of something pleasant or desirable.
The individual may be a person, or even an animal.
The authority may be either a group or a single person.
Punishment may be carried out formally under a system of law or informally in other kinds of social settings such as within a family.
The study and practice of the punishment of crimes, particularly as it applies to imprisonment, is called penology, or, corrections: called “correctional process”.
This correctional process could include: isolation, in order to prevent the wrongdoer’s having contact with potential victims, or the removal of a hand in order to make theft more difficult.
The word punishment is also used as a metaphor, as when a boxer experiences punishment during a fight.
Punishments differ in their degree of severity.
Punishments may include sanctions such as reprimands, deprivations of privileges or liberty, fines, incarcerations, ostracism, the infliction of pain,amputation and the death penalty.
Corporal punishment refers to punishments in which physical pain is intended to be inflicted upon the transgressor.
Punishments may be judged as fair or unfair: as to their degree of reciprocity and proportionality to the offense.
Punishment can be an integral part of socialization.
Punishing unwanted behavior is often part of a system of pedagogy or behavioral modification which also includes rewards.
Conditions commonly considered necessary properly to describe an action as punishment are that is imposed by an authority, involves some loss to the supposed offender, is in response to an offense and the human to whom the loss is imposed should be deemed at least somewhat responsible for the offense.
In psychology, punishment is the reduction of a behavior via application of an unpleasant stimulus, positive punishment, or removal of a pleasant stimulus, a negative punishment.
The definition requires that punishment is only determined after the fact by the reduction in behavior.
if the offending behavior of the subject does not decrease, it is not considered punishment: In operant conditioning terms, punishment does not need to involve any type of pain, fear, or physical actions; is a type of punishment, if the result is a decrease in the behavior.
Achieving a certain proportion of trust in the population can lead to self-governance without the need for punishment.
Punishments are applied for various purposes, most generally, to encourage and enforce proper behavior as defined by society or family.
Criminals are punished judicially, by fines, corporal punishment or custodial sentences such as prison.
Criminal detainees risk further punishments for breaches of internal rules.
Children, pupils and other trainees may be punished by their educators or instructors which may be parents, guardians, or teachers, tutors and coaches.
Slaves, domestic and other servants were subject to punishment by their masters.
Employees can still be punished by a contractual form of fine or demotion.
Most hierarchical organizations-military and police forces, or even churches, apply quite rigid internal discipline, even with a judicial system of their own via court martial, canonical courts, etc.
Punishment may also be applied on moral, or religious, grounds, as in penance or imposed in a theocracy with a religious police or though Inquisition.
Belief that an individual’s ultimate punishment is being sent by God, the highest authority, to an existence in Hell, a place believed to exist in the after-life, typically corresponds to sins committed during their life.
A principle with respect to the degree of punishment to be meted out is that the punishment should match the crime.
A felony is generally considered to be a crime of “high seriousness”, while a misdemeanor is not.
Possible reasons for punishment:
Two reasons given to justify punishment is that it is a measure to prevent people from committing an offense – deterring previous offenders from re-offending, and preventing those who may be contemplating an offense they have not committed from actually committing it.
Some criminologists state that the number of people convicted for crime does not decrease as a result of more severe punishment and conclude that deterrence is ineffective, while others argue that lack of deterring effect of increasing the sentences for already severely punished crimes say nothing about the significance of the existence of punishment as a deterring factor.
Some punishment includes work to reform and rehabilitation, so that they will not commit the offense again.
This is distinguished from deterrence, in that the goal here is to change the offender’s attitude to what they have done, and make them come to see that their behavior was wrong.
Incapacitation as a justification of punishment refers to the offender’s ability to commit further offenses being removed.
The death penalty does this in a permanent (and irrevocable) way.
Incapacitation of an offender to work, it must be the case that the offender would have committed a crime had they not been restricted in this way.
The more heinous crimes such as murders have the lowest levels of recidivism and hence are the least likely offenses to be subject to incapacitative effects.
Antisocial behavior and the like display high levels of recidivism and hence are the kind of crimes most susceptible to incapacitative effects.
Long sentences for burglaries amongst offenders in their late teens and early twenties fail to incapacitate when the natural reduction in offending due to ageing is taken into account: the longer the sentence, in these cases, the less the incapacitative effect.
Punishment has been justified as a measure of retributive justice, in which the goal is to try to rebalance any unjust advantage gained by ensuring that the offender also suffers a loss.
Suffering of the wrongdoer is seen as a desired goal in itself, even if it has no restorative benefits for the victim.
Restorative justice punishment may take the form of the offender righting the wrong or making restitution to the victim: Community service or compensation orders are examples of this sort of penalty.
In restorative justice, victims take an active role in a process with their offenders who are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, to repair the harm they’ve done:by apologizing, returning stolen money, or community service.
The restorative justice approach aims to help the offender want to avoid future offenses.
Punishment can serve as a means for society to publicly express denunciation of an action as being criminal.
Imprisonment means, at minimum, the loss of liberty and autonomy, as well as many material comforts, personal security, and access to heterosexual relations.
Prisoners face the numbing boredom and emptiness of prison life, a desert of wasted days in which little in the way of meaningful activity is possible.
There are critics of punishment who argue that punishment aimed at intentional actions forces people to suppress their ability to act on intent, arguing, suppression of intention causes the harmful behaviors to remain, making punishment counterproductive.
Punishment can be effective in stopping undesirable employee behaviors: tardiness, absenteeism or substandard work performance.
However, punishment does not necessarily cause an employee to demonstrate a desirable behavior.