[1] It represents the "most sustained and comprehensive account of punishment to have emerged from within the Marxist tradition" and "succeeds in opening up a whole vista of understanding which simply did not exist before it was written" (Garland 1990: 89, 110).
It was felt by leading American sociologists/criminologists, Thorsten Sellin and Edwin Sutherland, that the pivotal importance of the topic merited more extensive treatment than Rusche's article provided, for all its intrinsic conceptual originality (Melossi 2003: xiii).
It is beyond dispute that Rusche was a controversial and erratic figure, leaving a trail of intrigue in his wake in his itinerant life after Germany (Melossi 2003: xiv-xx).
The books surveys the historic development of these 'specific manifestations', dividing the progression of punishment into three conceptual epochs: the early Middle Ages, which utilized penance and fines; the late Middle Ages, when sanctions became markedly more barbarous, including branding, mutilation, torture and execution; and then the coming of capitalism, where forms of punishment came to perceive the prisoner as a source of human labour, including galley slavery, transportation and penal servitude with hard labour.
The authors argue that such class-skewed punishment provides only 'the illusion of security by covering the symptoms of social disease with a system of legal and moral value judgements' (p. 207).
They conclude that although the futility of severe punishment and cruel treatment may be proven 'a thousand times … so long as society is unable to solve its social problems, repression, the easy way out, will always be accepted' (ibid.).
In the late 1960s, however, the book's analytical stance and Marxian bent resonated with the developing school of critical criminology and its radical outlook.
It generated considerable interest in the economic underpinning to the concept of punishment, and was effectively updated and reapplied in works such as Melossi and Pavarini's The Prison and the Factory (1981).