A Theory of the Stability of Punishment

Abstract

One of the more interesting theses advanced by Durkheim, and subsequently by others, is that crime is a "normal" and not a pathological attribute of society "provided that it attains and does not exceed a certain level for each social type."I Durkheim meant by this that a particular level of crime is "an integral part of all healthy societies." 2 Far from being some aberrant form of societal maladjustment, it is a necessary result of the same phenomena which promote and maintain social solidarity. 3 For Durkheim, the essential mechanism contributing both to the stability of a society and to the natural occurrence of crime was the "collective conscience" or "the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society."4 When these beliefs and sentiments are held strongly by most of the members of a society, they form the social glue which binds the individuals in the society together.Yet, because of the unavoidable individual variations in the degree to which these sentiments are held, there will always be persons whose individual embodiment of the collective conscience is insufficiently developed.As a result, these persons will often engage in actions which are a serious affront to the collective conscience, and thereby defined as criminal.The collective conscience, then, provides a cognitive structure which serves as the basis for

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