Labor Market and Penal Sanction: Thoughts on the Sociology of Criminal Justice

Abstract

The study of crime and crime control is a fruitful field for sociological research. Sociological considerations have been included extensively in the examination of criminological problems. Even if the relationship between socioeconomic phenomena and the problems of crime and crime control are obvious to sociologists, there is still a long way to go from the naive recognition of this fact to making use of it in a systematic and scientific fashion. Criminality certainly occurs throughout all social classes. There is in all societies in which workers are scarce a tendency away from corporal punishment and the extermination of the criminal. Where the criminal's labor is valuable, exploitation is preferred to capital punishment, and forced labor is the corresponding mode of punishment. The task has been to study the historical relationship between criminal law and economics, the history of class struggle, and to utilize these interrelationships to analyze the present prison system.

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