Punishment
The authority may be either a group or a single person, and punishment may be carried out formally under a system of law or informally in other kinds of social settings such as within a family.
Inflicting something negative, or unpleasant, on a person or animal, without authority or not on the basis of a breach of rules is typically considered only revenge or spite rather than punishment.
[12] Punishments differ in their degree of severity, and may include sanctions such as reprimands, deprivations of privileges or liberty, fines, incarcerations,[19] ostracism, the infliction of pain,[20] amputation and the death penalty.
[24][25] Additionally, "aversive stimulus" is a label behaviorists generally apply to negative reinforcers (as in avoidance learning), rather than the punishers.
Punishment is sometimes called retaliatory or moralistic aggression;[26] it has been observed in all[clarification needed] species of social animals, leading evolutionary biologists to conclude that it is an evolutionarily stable strategy, selected because it favors cooperative behavior.
Dreber et al. demonstrate that while the availability of costly punishment can enhance cooperative behavior, it does not improve the group's average payoff.
[citation needed] This is corroborated by computer simulations proving that a few simple reactions well within mainstream views of the extremely limited intelligence of insects are sufficient to emulate the "political" behavior observed in great apes.
Certain scientists argue that this disproves the notion of humans having a biological feeling of intentional transgressions deserving to be punished.
[37] Children, pupils and other trainees may be punished by their educators or instructors (mainly parents, guardians, or teachers, tutors and coaches)—see Child discipline.
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.
[52][53][54][55] Punishment has been justified as a measure of retributive justice,[18][56][57][58] in which the goal is to try to rebalance any unjust advantage gained by ensuring that the offender also suffers a loss.
One reason societies have administered punishments is to diminish the perceived need for retaliatory "street justice", blood feud, and vigilantism.
Especially applied to minor offenses, punishment may take the form of the offender "righting the wrong", or making restitution to the victim.
Punishment can be explained by positive prevention theory to use the criminal justice system to teach people what are the social norms for what is correct, and acts as a reinforcement.
Besides educating people regarding what is not acceptable behavior, it serves the dual function of preventing vigilante justice by acknowledging public anger, while concurrently deterring future criminal activity by stigmatizing the offender.
[62][63][page needed] A unified theory of punishment brings together multiple penal purposes—such as retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation—in a single, coherent framework.
Instead of punishment requiring we choose between them, unified theorists argue that they work together as part of some wider goal such as the protection of rights.
Professor Deirdre Golash, author of The Case against Punishment: Retribution, Crime Prevention, and the Law, says: We ought not to impose such harm on anyone unless we have a very good reason for doing so.
These benefactors of humanity sacrificed their fellows to appease mythical gods and tortured them to save their souls from a mythical hell, broke and bound the feet of children to promote their eventual marriageability, beat slow schoolchildren to promote learning and respect for teachers, subjected the sick to leeches to rid them of excess blood, and put suspects to the rack and the thumbscrew in the service of truth.
In the District of Columbia jail, for example, inmates must wash their clothes and sheets in cell toilets because the laundry machines are broken.
Advocates of this viewpoint argue that such suppression of intention causes the harmful behaviors to remain, making punishment counterproductive.
These people suggest that the ability to make intentional choices should instead be treasured as a source of possibilities of betterment, citing that complex cognition would have been an evolutionarily useless waste of energy if it led to justifications of fixed actions and no change as simple inability to understand arguments would have been the most thrifty protection from being misled by them if arguments were for social manipulation, and reject condemnation of people who intentionally did bad things.
[68] Punishment can be effective in stopping undesirable employee behaviors such as tardiness, absenteeism or substandard work performance.
